Green Options

The Child Nutrition Act is up for renewal and Congress has extended the deadline to early 2010. We’ve talked before about the pitiful school lunch situation in the U.S. and about how you can help advocate healthy lunches for healthy kids. What we haven’t really covered are the whys. Are the benefits of healthier lunches really worth the cost?

Editor’s Note:  This review is part of the Green Books campaign. Today 100 bloggers are reviewing 100 great books printed in an environmentally friendly way. Our goal is to encourage publishers to get greener and readers to take the environment into consideration when purchasing books. This campaign is organized by Eco-Libris, a  a green company working to green up the book industry by promoting the adoption of green practices, balancing out books by planting trees, and supporting green books. A full list of participating blogs and links to their reviews is available on Eco-Libris website.

Let Me Out! How to enjoy the school run by Ann Kenrick is a book about sustainable school travel.  Any parent, no matter the size of their child’s school, has witnessed the traffic jam and exhaust fumes associated with the start and end of the school day, but it wasn’t always so.  According to Kenrick, if you picked a random group of 40-year-old and asked them how they traveled to school, over “90% will say they walked” to school.  Let Me Out! How to enjoy the school run contemplates why school transportation trends have changed in such a short time and suggest methods to “reverse the trend.”

Of course we know that childhood obesity is a problem. And children who are obese often have higher blood pressure.

But a new study shows a link between the amount of screen time a kid has and high blood pressure, no matter what size the child is.

We’ve known from previous studies that sedentary behaviors are linked to obesity, and that obesity is linked to high blood pressure, but this is the first time that we’ve linked those behaviors directly to elevated blood pressure.

The real worry here is that these kids only averaged 1.5 hours of TV a day, less than the two hours max that the American Academy of Pediatrics recommends. It’s all the other “sitting around” behavior that can lead to high blood pressure.

In a study of 131 children, British researchers think they might have isolated a gene that affects obesity.  Okay, so it’s not called the “cookie” gene.  But the FTO gene may play a role in whether someone is satiated, or knows she is full. Lead author Jane Wardle says the results show:

Some children don’t know when to stop, which could lead to the onset of obesity and a lifetime of health problems.

Today is “World Diabetes Day” brought to you by:

Eli Lilly
Astra Zeneca
LifeScan
Insulet
Medtronic
Pfiser
Takeda

And a handful of others. You see, diabetes is big business, insulin costs and insurance will always pay. Diabetes is one of the many preventable diseases that mothers give their children.

A new study in the December 2008 issue of the American Journal of Preventive Medicine suggests that an increase of green space in a neighborhood may decrease the chance for childhood obesity among neighborhood children.