The News & Observer reports,
Middle school students targeted with an intensive effort to reduce obesity did no better at losing weight than their peers in schools without special programs, researchers at UNC-Chapel Hill and elsewhere report.
The study, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, involved a three-year campaign at 42 schools around the country, including six in North Carolina. It was aimed primarily at cutting the proportion of middle school children who are overweight or obese.
I found the following to be an interesting comment:
“Stunned is a good word,” said Joanne Harrell, a nursing professor at UNC-CH and lead investigator for the North Carolina portion of the study. “We really have no answer” why the results were so similar between both groups of schools.
Wow. There is another interesting comment I would like to bring to your attention this morning.
“Doing a broad intervention like changing a school, as opposed to working with a single overweight child, has essentially never been shown to work,” said Dr. John Buse, one of the study’s researchers and director of the UNC Diabetes Care Center.
Of course, the problem is that kids go home and eat Twinkies and Ho Hos.
“It’s like a lot of things in education,” Williams said. “We can control a lot of what they do at school, but if they go home and they’re sedentary, they eat fried foods, that can sabotage the data.”
Look for claims that school-based interventions do not go far enough and necessitate broad, government-imposed restrictions on salt, fat, and sugar.
