A couple years ago, a celebrity chef out of London convinced the city’s school district to allow him to remake the lunch menu (and kitchens) of a group of city schools. He argued the change could make the kids both healthier and more successful at school.

The results so far are incredibly encouraging:

Their answer – a provisional one, since they are still refining the research – is that feeding primary school kids less fat, sugar and salt, and more fruit and vegetables, has a surprisingly large effect. Authorised absences, the best available proxy for illness, fell by 15 per cent in Greenwich, relative to schools in similar London boroughs. And relative to other boroughs, the proportion of children reaching Level Four in English rose by four and a half percentage points (more than six per cent), while the proportion of children achieving Level Five in Science rose by six points, or almost 20 per cent.

(via the Washington Post’s Ezra Klein)

This post is written by Dr. Joe Thompson, the director of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Center to Prevent Childhood Obesity and the Surgeon General of Arkansas. 

Cereal and Saturday morning cartoons go together like peanut butter and jelly. The downside is what else our children are seeing when they turn on the television.

The Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity at Yale University on Monday released Cereal F.A.C.T.S. (Food Advertising to Children and Teens Score) earlier this week which reported on, and rated, how cereals are marketed, and specifically targeted, towards children.

According to the report’s executive summary, “The least healthy cereals are the ones most marketed to children, and overall, children are exposed to a vast amount of marketing for highly-sugared cereals, more than for any other category of packaged food.”

Their results found that seven of the 10 cereals with the poorest nutritional content are the same products most heavily advertised on television and the internet. One of the study’s key findings is that cereals marketed to children have 85 percent more sugar, 65 percent less fiber, and 60 percent more sodium. And although none of these cereals qualifies to be included in the USDA Women, Infants and Children (WIC) program, they all are designated as “smart choices” by the Council of Better Business Bureaus. These foods may proclaim to be “better-for-you,” but in actuality they are contributing to children’s poor health and the obesity epidemic.

With marketing targeting our young people, it creates a near toxic media environment that overwhelms kids with advertising on children’s networks and websites like Nickelodeon, Disney, and the Cartoon Network–networks that now bring the advertising into our homes 24 hours a day, 7 days a week..

However alarming the statistics in the study may be, they are also indications that environmental factors can be changed via policy change and governmental regulation.

In the long run, this kind of regulation is helpful for all of our children, especially those who are disproportionately impacted by overweight and obesity: children of color and children in low-income communities.

To read the full study visit Cereal Facts.org.

Below is an excerpt from a post I wrote for the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s Commission to Build a Healthier America Leadership Blog. To read the full post, click here.

The type of community we live in clearly has a tremendous impact on our health. That is why I am so excited and inspired to be a part of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s Commission to Build a Healthier America. By shining a light on the way our economic, social, and physical environments affect our health, the commission is helping to expand our national discussion on health beyond just health care.

Those key environmental effects are never more clear than in the neighborhoods loaded with unhealthier food options. In an era when we are acutely aware of the effect of our diets on our overall health, we are leaving millions of Americans adrift in neighborhoods where healthy eating is next to impossible. For many people, food “choices” are really nothing of the sort. People must first have a broad and healthy set of food options in order to be able to make healthy choices.

To learn more about the Commission and its mission, visit www.CommissionOnHealth.org