Maybe we should have a standardized diet. We can all eat the
same things for breakfast, lunch and dinner every day. They can come in little
tin packages, labeled “Monday Breakfast” or “Friday Dinner.” I’m sure we can
create a government office to handle this. And since citizens won’t have to go
to the grocery store, we can fund this program with the households' grocery
budgets. Although, now that I think about it, hosting a party would present a logistical nightmare…
Ok, I’m kidding. Some people probably think that’s a great
idea and others probably hate it, if I can judge by the comments under any Los
Angeles Times article that even hints that maybe schools should step in to
teach healthy eating to students. Those comment boards are usually littered
with people either blaming parents for not teaching this, or people proclaiming
that no one should interfere with their right to teach their kids to eat
garbage. It turns out, though, that what parents teach kids has very little
influence on what teens actually eat.
Patricia Mawusi Amos, Freda Dfiza Intiful, and Laurene
Boateng published a study on SAGE Open in December that found that teens’ peers
have more influence on their eating habits than either the media or the teens’
parents. They conducted their study in high schools in Ghana , and
found that adolescents eat what their friends eat, and that the more influence
the friends had, the less healthy those habits were likely to be. And in
another stinging blow to feminists, girls were found to have less healthy
habits than boys.
I think, then, that we can assume we need to start warning
kids in the second grade not to succumb to peer pressure to eat a cupcake. Peer
pressure’s already in the curriculum, warning kids to ‘Just Say No’ to offers
of alcohol or drugs. “Red Ribbon Week” takes place each October, where students
are encouraged to wear red and sign pledges avowing they will remain drug-free.
Let’s schedule “Green Ribbon Week” for November, where students will sign
pledges to remain sugar-free and to eat more vegetables.
But more seriously, kids spend a lot of time with their
friends, so is it any real surprise that these friends are so influential on
diet? And so it seems that perhaps early intervention in schools would be a
good thing. Overweight teens are a problem for the United States . Teens don’t eat
right, and they do follow the lead of their friends. I knew that Cheez-Its and
Dr. Pepper did not constitute a healthy lunch in high school, but that’s what I
ate most days. That, or something even more disturbing like Flaming Hot Cheetos
and Pepsi, was what my friends ate. Was that an act of rebellion? Probably. I
can’t speak for my friends, but I know that my parents not have let me get away
with eating like that if I had been at home.
The thing about diet is that a crappy one in high school can
leave lasting physiological effects, even if the diet is later improved. UCLA researchers
found that subjects who didn't have enough iron in their diets in their teen
years had structural changes to their brain later that made them more vulnerable
to neurodegeneration. These teens were otherwise healthy.
If friends are the biggest indicator of how well a teen is
going to eat, then it makes the most sense to try to get all kids to understand
how to eat well and then make that available to them. Going after companies and
limiting advertisements during programming aimed at kids is fair, but not
maybe not the most effective approach. If we want kids and teens to eat
healthier, we have to teach them to want that first. Because I'll be honest, tin boxes packed by a government agency determining what we eat sounds terrible. If nothing else, that would take all the fun out of going to a Chinese restaurant and ordering dishes to share.
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