Our Growing…Children?

While we love talking about flowers, trees and shrubs that are growing that is not the only thing that is blossoming before our eyes.  Childhood obesity is at an all time high, according to the Annual National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, nearly one-third of US children are overweight.  In total about 25 million children, defined as ages 6-11, and adolescents, defined as ages 12-17, obesity is defined as the total body weight of the person that has more that 25% fat in boys and more than 32% fat in girls with the easiest way to measure this being through skin folds.   This trend is particularly troublesome because it can start kids on a path to health problems that were once confined to adults, such as diabetes, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, heart disease, menstrual problems, trouble sleeping and asthma. 

But Dr. Candice Shoemaker, Associate Professor of Horticulture, Forestry and Recreation Resources at K-State, hopes to do something about it.  She has received a grant for $1.04 million from the US Department of Agricultures National Research Institute to study whether gardening can promote healthier lifestyles.  The study is called Project PLANTS, or Promoting Lifelong Activity and Nutrition Through Schools.  Shoemaker describes the initial study that paved this road, “Soon after I started at K-State, in the fall of 2001, I was invited to join in a project to implement the Junior Master Gardener Health and Nutrition Through the Garden program in elementary schools.  My responsibility was to investigate the effectiveness of the program as a way to change children’s perception of fruits and vegetables, their willingness to try fruits and vegetables and general nutritional knowledge.  That two year project provided the preliminary data and the direction for Project PLANTS.”

So, why are there so many overweight kids today, what has changed so drastically in our way of living that these numbers are sky rocketing by leaps and bounds with each passing decade?  Shoemaker attempts to explain this enormously multi-faceted issue, “The availability and pull of video games, hundreds of television channels is a very effective lure to encouraging sedentary behavior.  Many of these attractions provide an avenue for advertisers to market fast food and snack food.  How many times do you think a child sees an advertisement to eat a juicy apple while surfing the Internet?  Portion sizes are expanding with our waistbands.  The latch-key child, for safety purposes, needs to stay inside while waiting for the parents to come home, and once the parents are home, dinner is served, home work is done, is there time to go outside and play?  How walk able are our communities?  Drive thru’s encourage us to stay in our cars while remote controls encourage us to stay on the couch.  I could go on but I won’t, I hope this shows how complicated the issue of childhood obesity is.”

In many ways we have no one to blame but ourselves, if the family is eating fried foods and trans fats how can we expect our children not to be turned off by fresh fruits and vegetables when a poptart is just as accessible as a bundle of grapes.  But the public message about eating correctly is starting to sink in to adults and children alike, however the messages about being active are not as effective and some of that could have to do with the reduction or loss of Physical Education classes in a child’s school day.  Shoemaker says, “In the context of my research over the past four years, I would say that a high percentage of the children are interested in eating right, less are interested in exercising, and most are interested in caring for the environment through gardening.”

With the moneys that Shoemaker has acquired through this grant she is going to create gardens in the Manhattan-Ogden Unified School District and begin after school programs.  The four-year project will include one year of planning and pilot testing; two years of conducting the experiment with half the schools receiving gardens and half not by a random selection; and the final year will involve analyzing the project and evaluating its effectiveness, with the hope of creating a model of how a school garden can work and a curriculum for a permanent after-school gardening program.

Gardening is a very compelling teaching tool, children really seem to respond to the effects of a well-tended garden or plant particularly when it comes to building environmental awareness.  If we can relay to our children the importance of proper care and nutrition for a healthier planet maybe in turn that might resonate into their own thought process about their bodies needing the same essentials for a healthy foundation, care and good nutrition.  Shoemaker has high hopes for Project PLANTS, she states, “We hope the result of this project will be an after-school gardening program that is an effective overweight prevention program and a community-level program that is an effective method to establish and sustain school gardens.”