Too Many Kids Are Pigging, Pooping Out

It was almost like a TV commercial.

Dad brought Junior to the Golden Arches on Whittier Boulevard in Boyle Heights to fill him up before school Tuesday. While Pop read the paper, the little guy, who was about 8 years old, chubbed up on a pile of pancakes, sausage and hash browns.

A block away, a woman parked at the Burger King and unloaded her three children. One of the toddlers bounded out of the car like a banshee, then paused at the entrance, ecstatic about a “Lord of the Rings” promotion in the window.

Here in the land of year-round sunshine, personal trainers and alfalfa sprouts, we’re raising a generation of cherubs on diets of salt, sugar and fat. And we’ve got the lethargic academic scores, a diabetes epidemic and soaring public health costs to prove it.

Seventy-seven percent of California students in grades 5 through 12 flunked a basic fitness test that involved running, push-ups and pull-ups. Only 19% of Latinos and African Americans passed muster. More than a third of both groups were overweight.

“It doesn’t surprise me,” said state Sen. Martha Escutia (D-Whittier), who introduced an anti-junk food bill last year that got watered down by soft drink lobbyists, among others. To raise money, in fact, Los Angeles public schools have rolled out the red carpet for Coke, Pepsi and Pizza Hut to peddle their products on campus.

“With regard to Latino children,” Escutia said, “there is an obesity epidemic, which obviously results in diabetes.”

I drove past the Burger King and headed over to the nearby Euclid Avenue Elementary School, where parents were dropping off their children.

“When you go to the market, it’s, ‘I saw that on television!’ ” Susanna Almaguer, a parent volunteer, said about the experience of food shopping with her children. “They show chips and cereal, chips and cereal. That’s all.”

Olga Garcia, the principal, said they teach nutrition at Euclid, but they’re working against the forces of junk food marketing and cultural dietary habits, among other things. I found out exactly what she meant from cafeteria manager Guadalupe Rodriguez.

Rodriguez told me that the standard breakfast at Euclid is chorizo and egg tacos.

I can tell you from personal experience that chorizo and eggs happen to be delicious. Problem is, you just don’t feel razor sharp and ready to face the day after swallowing a cholesterol bomb like that. You want to go take a nap.

At snack time, the hot seller in the Euclid cafeteria is a cookie nearly the size of a discus. Rodriguez said they sell 90 of those a day--some of them packed with M&Ms--compared; to 40 sticks of string cheese and 10 cups of yogurt.

“A lot of students didn’t know what the yogurt was,” said Rodriguez, who started offering it a year ago. “A lot of them hadn’t even been exposed to vegetables like broccoli and cauliflower.”

She estimates that 60% to 70% of the students at Euclid are overweight. Her own family is a little heavy too, she said.

“My own grandchildren can’t read their names, but they know M is for McDonald’s,” Rodriguez said.

Lunch on Tuesday was chicken nuggets that are bought in bulk, frozen and prepackaged. “They’re baked, though, not fried,” said Rodriguez, and they came with salad, apples and bread.

Sounds reasonably healthy. But Friday is pizza day, the dish kids love most, and pizza pockets are going to be on the menu soon.

With this kind of fuel, and a statewide de-emphasis on physical education, it takes no PhD to figure out why almost 80% of our students are out of breath.

In some urban areas, there are fewer extracurricular sports programs too, and a lot of parents are afraid to let their kids out of the house for fear of what’s happening on the streets and in the parks. So they end up watching television, which makes them no healthier, and certainly no smarter.

“I’m one of those parents,” said Rodriguez, who picks up her 16-year-old from high school and takes him home, but not before stopping at In-N-Out Burger once or twice a week.

It’s hard to break bad habits, she said.

I know. In Duke Helfand’s story about fitness testing, one L.A. physician said the traditional Mexican eye-opener of chilaquiles is no breakfast of champions.

For much of my teenage and adult life, I’ve been addicted to chilaquiles. I can smell them at 60 mph, and have been known to cross median strips going after them.

“I still make chilaquiles, rice, refried beans and cheese enchiladas, but I don’t use lard anymore,” Rodriguez said.

She mentioned in passing that she has diabetes. So does her mother, her grandmother and her son. And then she began counting the cases on her mother’s side. Three of her mother’s sisters, and two of her brothers, have diabetes.

“Two of our students here have diabetes,” she added, “and a lot of the parents.”

This is out of control.

I am no health nut. I eat and drink a little--and sometimes a lot--of everything, and pray that periodic flirtations with moderation will save me.

But when eight in 10 kids have the same chemistry as a Krispy Kreme doughnut, and can’t run around the track without paramedics on standby, it might be time for drastic measures.

Sen. Escutia, whose own diabetes is under control, says you don’t have to abandon your culture to be healthy. You’ve just got to get the lard out, so to speak, and get off the couch now and then.

“The public health cost is in the billions,” she said. “We’ve got a health care crisis on our hands.”

Escutia said she and her colleagues have to do a better job of nutrition education and creating more recreational opportunities for children. “But a lot of it has to come from home. It’s up to the parents to do their part.”

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Steve Lopez writes Monday, Wednesday and Friday. He can be reached at steve.lopez@latimes.com.