Obesity Another Urban Danger for Latino Youths

It’s 10:30 a.m. on Saturday, time for 17-year-old Danny Luna to start his day with a double bacon cheeseburger and fries. A bacon Swiss burger will do for Juan Torres, 18, while Angie Chavez, 16, selects a pack of chocolate doughnuts.

They’re just typical teenagers, eating a typical breakfast. Typical, that is, for a generation of kids among whom rates of obesity have reached unprecedented heights, health researchers say.

Nationwide, the increase in numbers of overweight kids--and adults--is considered a public-health epidemic. But the phenomenon is especially prevalent among Latinos, whose rates of child obesity are the highest of any ethnic group except Native Americans, according to statistics provided yearly by the state to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control.

In Los Angeles County and California, the percentage of children the government terms overweight hovers between 13% and 15%, versus about 10% nationally, according to the CDC’s Pediatric Nutrition Surveillance reports.

But it’s in urban Latino enclaves like the city of San Fernando where crime, poverty and the stress of acculturation seem to conspire against fitness in particularly potent ways. Among some groups of kids in this part of the county--Latino children around age 12 for example--rates of obesity are as high as one in five. That’s four times the prevalence among U.S. kids of the late 1960s.

The high incidence among the state’s fastest growing ethnic group “is a time bomb,” because it presages health risks later in life, said Stanley Bassin, who has studied weight in Latino youth with a UC Irvine group.

“It’s scary,” said Kathy Proctor, a health educator for the teen clinic at San Fernando High School, just around the corner from where the teens ate breakfast. Proctor says she sees a lot of kids who are “what looks like 60 pounds overweight. In talking to them, you find they are struggling with it.”

Unlike hunger, the nutritional issue commonly linked to poverty, youthful obesity in any population eludes easy fixes. Its causes are rooted in a mosaic of poorly understood social and cultural factors. “It’s a can of worms,” said Nancy L. King, a Montrose nutrition therapist who works with adolescents.

She and others increasingly talk about creeping obesity among all Americans as a social problem rather than a question of individual health. “These numbers suggest a mass phenomena going on . . . something psychological on a mass scale,” said Susan Foerster, chief of nutrition and cancer prevention with the state Department of Health Services.

But at mostly Latino San Fernando High School, obesity is only the most visible sign of what health officials say are rampant signs of poor nutrition.

Staff members at the clinic, which is run by the nonprofit Northeast Valley Health Corp., tell of kids who come in feeling dizzy from irregular eating, or who are both fat and anemic--signs of a diet so out of whack that even excess calories can’t make up for the lack of vital nutrients. “I don’t know what these kids do, where they eat or how they eat,” said nurse practitioner Stacy Bower. “Either they don’t eat anything at all, or they eat a lot of junk.”

Kids pay the price in personal anguish. “I want to eat different, change to salad and all that. . . . I want to lose 50 pounds,” said Torres, a high school senior who grows quieter as he talks about his weight. He is 5 foot 7, 230 pounds, he said.

New efforts locally and statewide aim to improve nutrition education for the young. San Fernando High School, for example, was recently selected as the only school in Los Angeles to host a state Health Services program called Project Lean. The program teaches kids to make healthier choices in food and to advocate better health among their peers.

Another program, Healthy Generations, dispenses similar nutrition information to parents at select elementary schools.

Whether such programs will lessen obesity is far from clear. Like adults, children who seek to slim down face tough odds, said Kathie Davis, a pediatric dietitian at Childrens Hospital in Los Angeles who works with overweight kids. “If we just reduce the severity of the obesity, we consider that success,” she said.

Lack of exercise is fingered by researchers as a main reason why kids of all colors are gaining weight. Television, video games and computers keep children “busy sitting still,” said Davis.

But in some places like San Fernando, crime restricts kids from exercise because frightened parents keep them inside.

“We see a lot of teenagers around here, they are looking for little kids” to recruit for gangs, said Amalia Espinosa, mother of two in Pacoima. “If my children are outside, I’m always watching them,” she added in Spanish. “They can’t go where I can’t see them.”

The last time her daughter went to the park down the street, she came back crying, complaining of “gente rara”-- strange people, Espinosa said. So her kids mostly do activities inside.

Raquel Gonzalez, a Mexican immigrant living in Pacoima, said she used to let her four kids ride bikes in the hall of their apartment for exercise. Sometimes, after a stir-crazy day spent inside, she’d send her son Oscar, now 10, to run laps around the complex--but never beyond the secured wall. “It’s dangerous,” she said in Spanish.

Working-poor parents in such neighborhoods “give their kids a key and tell them to get inside and stay in there until the parents get home,” said Joanne Ikeda, a nutrition education specialist at UC Berkeley. It’s a perfect scenario for kids to gain weight, she said.

Some efforts to address obesity in the Latino community target aspects of Latin American cuisine. For example, social workers urge recent immigrants to switch to low-fat milk. And vegetable oil is recommended as a substitute for the more traditional manteca, or lard.

But recent research suggests nutrition problems are owed less to traditional foods than their transplant to an American setting.

“The more [immigrants] acculturate . . . the more they become at risk,” said Nathan D. Wong, a UC Irvine associate professor working with Bassin.

Latino youth obesity is a U.S. phenomenon, not a Mexican one, Wong has found.

Latino children born in Mexico are less overweight and more fit than their U.S.-born counterparts. And second-generation Latinos eat a less nutritional diet than their predecessors, said Louis Grivetti, a nutrition professor at UC Davis. Similar findings have come from studies of children of Vietnamese and Japanese immigrants raised in the United States.

Something is lost in the transition between the Latino tradition of home-cooked food and daily market trips, and the American one of fast, packaged foods, these studies suggest.

Immigrants can’t fully transfer their cuisine to urban Los Angeles, and “they start losing native foods,” said Cyndi Guerra, spokeswoman for Project Lean at the state Department of Health Services.

Meanwhile, convenience stores and fast-food restaurants are everywhere; both industries have doubled in size in the last decade.

Maria Carranza, an immigrant from Honduras living in San Fernando, described her struggle to keep her three kids from being seduced by fast food. “It is easier here economically than in Honduras,” she said in Spanish. “But here, you have to tell your children what to eat and what not to eat. They always see things on television, hamburgers and things, and they say, ‘Give that to me.’ ”

As agua frescas give way to Big Gulps, and fish tacos are replaced by Taco Bell, something else is lost, said King, the Montrose therapist.

“There is less time spent preparing foods, less opportunity to interact around food,” she said. “Families don’t eat meals together and miss out on that time connecting. I see kids fending for themselves with food.

“That’s the crisis. It’s not high fat or low fat, red meat or no red meat. Kids who eat alone eat more. They just do.”

Especially in immigrant families, American habits clash with families’ traditional connection over food, King added. “It wreaks havoc. . . . It contributes to the breakdown of the family.”

Junk food, harried family lives and meals alone are common denominators among many kids at San Fernando High School.

Eddie Fernando, a slim 17-year-old, is eating a burrito during the morning nutrition break. Eddie claims he eats at fast-food restaurants nine or 10 times a week. He said his schedule of work and school leaves little time for balanced meals. “I don’t like [fast food], but what can I do?” he said.

Zulma Hernandez, 17, said she put on weight during “a difficult time” after her father left the family. She is almost 5 feet 11 inches and entered the ninth grade at 300 pounds. She has since dropped to 190 by cooking mostly for herself since the family rarely has time to eat together.

Other teenagers told similar stories. Danny, the teenager who ate the cheeseburger for breakfast, said he didn’t plan to eat again for the rest of the day. Angie, of the chocolate doughnuts, explained that she and her mother were moving in with relatives and had no time for breakfast. Besides, “I’m addicted to junk food. I never eat fruit.”

Some researchers have explained higher rates of Latino obesity by theorizing that Latinos are less worried about being fat than other body-conscious ethnic groups.

But several San Fernando High students said they felt depression and anxiety over weight. And the result of weight gain among kids is rampant dieting, students say.

“Everyone is on a diet. All you hear is diet, diet, diet,” said Sandra Santa Cruz, 17. “Basically, all my friends want to lose,” said Michelle Vasquez, 17, who is 5 feet 2 inches and recently lost 23 pounds to weigh 140.

Teenage dieting among school kids in California is epidemic, according to a recent survey of 2,542 high schoolers through the state Department of Education.

A whopping 33% said they had been on diets within the last month. The rate for Latinos was among the highest of any group: 37%.

Few health professionals find adolescent dieting encouraging. “That’s horrible,” said King. “I would rather have kids focusing on adopting a healthy lifestyle,” said Ikeda, the Berkeley expert.

Zulma, the 17-year-old who lost 110 pounds, agreed. “Diets got me worse,” she said. She lost weight through balanced eating, jogging and an acceptance of the way she looks, she said. But she says she understands why many friends pursue crash diets.

“Everyone sees the ads, the magazines. They say, ‘Oh, look at that girl’s body,’ ” Zulma said.