Students not as hefty at end of food study

Five Philadelphia elementary schools replaced sodas with fruit juice. They scaled back snacks and banished candy. They handed out raffle tickets for wise food choices. They taught kids, their parents and their teachers about good nutrition.

What have they got to show for it? The number of children who gained weight during the two-year experiment was half the number of students who packed on pounds in schools that didn’t make those efforts.

“It’s a really dramatic effect from a public health point of view. That’s the good news,” said Gary Foster, director of the Center for Obesity Research and Education at Temple University.

Foster is the lead author of the Philadelphia schools study being published today in the journal Pediatrics.

The bad news: There were still plenty of new overweight kids in the five schools -- more than 7% of them became overweight, compared with 15% in the schools that didn’t make changes.

“That signals to me that we have lots more work to do,” Foster said.

The Philadelphia study put to the test a program developed by the Food Trust, a local nonprofit organization that works to improve access to affordable, healthy food.

The 1,349 students that participated in the study were in grades four to six. At the start, about 40% were overweight or obese. School staff and students were taught lessons on good nutrition, and that message was reinforced in other subjects: food labels were used to help teach fractions.

The children were also urged to exercise during recess.

After two years, besides fewer new overweight children, the overall number of overweight students at the schools dropped 10% to 15%. At the schools that didn’t make changes, the number rose a quarter to 20%.