The scourge the parents were combating was neither the drugs nor the violence that plagues this North Philadelphia neighborhood. It was bad eating habits.
“Candy!” said one of the parents, McKinley Harris, peering into a small bag one child carried out of the store.“That’s not food.”
The parents standing guard outside the Oxford Food Shop are foot soldiers in a national battle over the diets of children that has taken on new fervor. With 20 percent of the nation’s children obese, theUnited States Department of Agriculturehas proposed new standards for federally subsidized school meals that call for more balanced meals and, for the first time, a limit oncalories. The current standard specifies only a minimum calorie count, which some schools meet by adding sweet foods.
Earlier this year, whenMichelle Obama, as part of her campaign against childhoodobesity, announced that Wal-Mart would reduce salt and sugar in its packaged foods, she said,“We’re beginning to see the ripple effects on the choices folks are making about how they feed their kids.”
But this effort is up against an array of powerful forces, from economics to biology, all of which are playing out in Philadelphia, where the obesity rate is among the nation’s highest. At the intersection of North 28th and West Oxford Streets, the Oxford Food Shop and the William D. Kelley School are in a tug of war over the cravings of kids.
Amelia Brown, the principal of the kindergarten through eighth grade school, said that deplorable diets caused headaches and stomachaches that undermine academic achievement, and that older students showed a steady progression of flab. So inside the school, thenutritionbug is rampant.
The gym teacher, Beverly Griffin, teaches healthy eating using a toy model of the federal food pyramid and rewritten children’s songs.“And on his farm he had some carrots,” Tatyana, a first grader, belted out one recent morning, skipping around the gym with her classmates.
Like schools throughout the nation, Kelley has expelled soda and sweet snacks. Instead of high-calorie fruit juices, the school nurse, Wendy Fine, said,“I push water.”
The Agriculture Department wants to change the content of federally subsidized school meals— 33 million lunches and 9 million breakfasts a day— by the fall of 2012. Beyond the calorie cap, the new standards would emphasize whole grains, vegetables and fruits and set tighter limits on sodium and fats.
“This will mean a huge shift in school meals,” said Margo G. Wootan, the director of nutrition policy at theCenter for Science in the Public Interest, a consumer advocacy group.
Fernando Gallard, a spokesman for the Philadelphia School District, said schools were meeting the new federal meal proposals by using more dark green and orange vegetables, as well as fruits, whole grains and legumes.
The food industry is defending products by focusing on their mineral and vitamin content. The National Potato Council, for example, is warning against cutting starch, saying children need potatoes’ potassium and fiber.
Some companies are adjusting their recipes, although hardly drastically. After Philadelphia schools stopped buying the sugary products of the local bakery icon Tastykake, the company created a 190-calorie muffin, reducing sugar enough to move it below flour on the list of ingredients. The new formulation, which uses whole grains, got Tastykake muffins back on the school breakfast menu and classified as bread.“It is sweet,” said Autumn R. Bayles, a company senior vice president.“Sugar is just not the first ingredient.”
To match the efforts inside the school, one of Ms. Brown’s first acts as principal last August was to ask owners of nearby corner stores to stop selling to students in the morning.
There was a reason for this. While research suggests that as little as an extra 200 calories a day can make an adult overweight, a recent study led by Gary D. Foster, the director of the Center for Obesity Research and Education atTemple University, found that children were getting 360 calories a day from chips, candy and sugary drinks— all for an average of $1.06.
Gladys Tejada, who owns the Oxford shop, said,“It’s a good thing, what they’re trying to do, but I can’t control who comes in.”
Nor can she control what they buy.“They like it sweet,” she said.“They like it cheap.”
Since 2001, a Philadelphia organization called Food Trust has worked to get corner stores to offer healthier foods, including fresh fruit, vegetables and water, as well as products with reduced sugar, salt and fat. But just 507 of the city’s estimated 2,500 corner stores have signed on.
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