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Latest News on September 2007

September 17
Under-use of school breakfast program

Fewer than 30 percent of San Diego County children who qualify for a subsidized school breakfast participate in the program, a number well below state and national averages, a report has found.

Report criticizes under-use of school breakfast program

By Jeff McDonald
SAN DIEGO UNION-TRIBUNE
September 15, 2007

The failure of school principals to fully enroll students costs the region almost $25 million a year in federal reimbursements, according to California Food Policy Advocates, a San Francisco group that fights hunger and promotes nutrition among low-income families.

The organization urges education leaders across the state to do a better job making sure schools offer breakfast to students.

“All students, regardless of their location or their family income, should be able to start the day well-nourished and ready to learn,” said Kumar Chandran, who wrote the report. Schools “have a special responsibility to offer breakfast.”

Widespread lack of participation in the decades-old federal School Breakfast Program is not limited to San Diego County.

According to the report, only 35 percent of California students who enroll in free and reduced lunch program take advantage of the same plan available for breakfast. The national average is nearly 45 percent. The San Diego County average is 29.9 percent.

Educators fear the lack of breakfast may exacerbate the so-called achievement gap, the long-standing difference in test scores between some minority groups and their white counterparts.

The federal School Breakfast Program was developed as a pilot project in 1966 to help “nutritionally needy” children and was made permanent by Congress in 1975. It provides money for food, but not for labor or equipment needed to serve meals.

Participation in the program is voluntary. Decisions about whether to provide breakfast are typically left to individual principals rather than district officials.

In San Diego County, 99 schools teaching more than 66,000 children have never signed up for the breakfast program, the report said. Twenty-seven of those campuses are defined as “severe-need” schools.

“A lot of districts are kind of stuck in the old mindset” that parents are responsible for their children’s breakfast, Chandran said. “And that doesn’t yield good participation.”

State funding difficult The report suggests that all schools offer breakfast and that they should apply for grants to pay for equipment needed to serve the meals.

Phyllis Bramson-Paul of the state Department of Education said her office is committed to raising the number of students who eat breakfast at school, but the state can fund only 25 percent of grant applications.

Apart from that, the new state budget failed to include $11 million earmarked for the Fresh Start program, which pays schools an extra 10 cents for each serving of fruit served at breakfast, Bramson-Paul said.

“We know that the more kids eat breakfast, the better they do academically,” she said, “but the budget is so tight this year.”

Three campuses in the Fallbrook Union Elementary School District are on the list of 27 “severe need” schools that do not offer breakfast. Assistant Superintendent James Whitlock said there has been little demand,

“If parents felt like this is something they are interested in, certainly they ought to discuss it with the principal,” he said. “We have no policy that would preclude this.”

Six Cajon Valley Union School District campuses appeared on the list of needy schools that do not provide breakfast. Child nutrition services director Linda Patzold said starting a breakfast program at those schools would be a “huge undertaking” that is not a top priority.

“At this time, (principals) have not felt the need for that program or the community push for that program,” said Patzold, who noted that grants to pay operational costs have been difficult to come by.

The San Diego Unified School District appears to be doing a good job serving breakfast to its 130,000 students. Four city schools landed on the “severe needs” list, but three are charter schools outside the district’s control.

*‘Families are busy’

“Breakfast at school is a really viable option for any child,” said Joanne Tucker, a district food-services official. “Families are busy in the mornings. It’s usually all they can do to get kids out the door dressed.”

Tucker said three schools south of Interstate 8 just launched a program where children eat breakfast in class rather than before school, which is one of the key recommendations of the California Food Policy Advocates report.

“It made the teachers and the students have a better learning experience throughout the morning,” she said.

The San Diego Hunger Coalition co-released the report on school breakfasts.

“Hopefully, the county and school districts will pick up the ball and run with it,” said Tia Anzellotti, the coalition’s executive director. “This is another really important tool in the fights against obesity and in promoting health and good nutrition.

Statewide, about 700,000 students attend schools that do not offer breakfast, the report said. More than 1 million additional students would eat breakfast every day if all schools participated in the breakfast program, it said.

The low participation rate costs California $330 million a year in federal tax dollars that are not returned to the state, researchers said.

September 12
High blood pressure increasing in kids

The rate of health-threatening high blood pressure has started rising among American children for the first time in decades, researchers reported yesterday, confirming a trend long feared by experts worried about the consequences of the obesity epidemic.

More Kids Developing High Blood Pressure

By Rob Stein
The Washington Post
September 11, 2007

After dropping steadily since the 1960s, diagnoses of early hypertension and full-blown high blood pressure began creeping up among children and adolescents beginning in the late 1980s as the obesity epidemic apparently began to take its toll, according to an analysis of data collected from nearly 30,000 youths by seven federal surveys.

Although the increases so far have been small — just 2.3 percentage points for early hypertension and 1 point for full-blown hypertension — they translate into hundreds of thousands more children developing what often becomes a chronic, lifelong condition. Considered primarily an affliction of the middle-aged and elderly, high blood pressure is a leading cause of a host of health problems, including heart attack and stroke — the nation’s top killers.

“This is a major public health problem,” said Rebecca Din-Dzietham of the Morehouse School of Medicine in Atlanta, who led the study, which will be published in the Sept. 25 issue of the American Heart Association journal Circulation. “Unless this upward trend in high blood pressure is reversed, we could be facing an explosion of new cardiovascular disease cases in young adults and adults.”

With an adult form of diabetes already being diagnosed more frequently in children and more young people developing high cholesterol, the new finding is another indication that the obesity epidemic is spawning a generation at heightened risk for illnesses that struck their parents and grandparents only later in life, experts said.

“This is very worrisome,” said Elizabeth G. Nabel, director of the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute. “Typically in the past we didn’t begin to see high blood pressure until someone was in their 30s or 40s. This is another piece of evidence suggesting that the obesity epidemic will likely turn into a heart disease epidemic.”

Previous research had indicated that the obesity epidemic was driving up blood pressure levels among children. But the new research is the first to document that the higher levels had begun translating into medically significant high blood pressure and a recently defined condition known as early hypertension or pre-hypertension.

“Our paper is the first to describe an increase in the prevalence of high blood pressure,” Din-Dzietham said. “I think we should … ring the alarm bell.”

Din-Dzietham and her colleagues analyzed data collected in nationally representative surveys conducted between 1963 and 2002 by the federal government’s National Center for Health Statistics, involving 29,165 girls and boys, ages 8 to 17.

The researchers found that the prevalence of childhood obesity drifted slightly but steadily higher between 1963 and 1980, when it started rising rapidly. It affected less than about 6 percent of U.S. children in 1963 but nearly 17 percent by 2002.

The proportion of children and adolescents with pre-hypertension rose from 7.7 percent to 10 percent between 1988 and 2002, while the rate of hypertension increased from 2.7 percent to 3.7 percent. That percentage-point increase translates into an additional 410,150 children nationwide, Din-Dzietham calculated.

Unlike for adults, there is no single reading that constitutes the threshold for high blood pressure and pre-hypertension for children. Normal blood pressure varies depending on age, sex and height.

Although other factors may be playing a role, such as children getting less exercise, eating more salty fast food and prepared foods, and experiencing greater stress, researchers believe obesity is the main culprit.

“If you were going to make a list of the factors that are driving this, obesity would be numbers one through 10,” Nabel said.

In addition to putting children at risk of health problems later on, high blood pressure can have more immediate effects, requiring constant monitoring, experts said.

“It often forces them to limit their daily activities,” said Melinda Sothern of the Louisiana State University Health Sciences Center in New Orleans. “It robs them of their childhood, really. They’re robbed of the natural enjoyment of being a kid — being able to play outside, run, participate in gymnastics. If they have high blood pressure, they have a constant risk of stroke.”

Experts recommend that children with early hypertension or hypertension be put on a carefully controlled diet-and-exercise regimen to try to lower their blood pressure to safe levels. If that fails, drugs can be prescribed.

“If children are becoming hypertensive in their teens, they may be committing themselves to lifelong therapy for hypertension,” Nabel said.

The findings underscore the need to screen children and adolescents for the condition, experts said.

“There are more and more kids out there who have high blood pressure, and pediatricians and family physicians have to make sure they are taking blood pressure in children and adolescents,” said Stephen R. Daniels, a professor of pediatrics at the University of Colorado School of Medicine, speaking on behalf of the American Heart Association.