Message to Kids: Eat ‘Go Foods’

WASHINGTON — Choose food portions no larger than your fist. Eat “go foods” — like lowfat milk, oatmeal and veggies — every day and save chips and other “whoa foods” for special occasions.

This advice is part of a new government campaign to use kid- friendly nutrition tips to prevent preteens from getting fat.

Simple training did get 8- to 10-year-olds to eat healthier for three years, concludes the biggest study ever to track the impact of childhood nutrition education. But there’s more work to do: Snacks, desserts and pizza still made up an astonishing one-third of those youngsters’ diets.

Nevertheless, “kids can learn to take small, positive, healthy steps,” said Dr. Elizabeth Nabel, chief of the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute, which sponsored the research and today begins the “We Can!” program to spread the results. “It suggests that kids who learn to eat healthy during their adolescence will continue to eat healthy.”

One key: Don’t forbid the foods that children find yummy, but teach balance. For example, eating a healthy breakfast is important for staying fit. Unsweetened whole-grain cereal, like oatmeal, is a go-food choice. Prefer waffles or pancakes? Those are “slow foods,” perhaps for the weekend. Croissants, doughnuts or sweetened breakfast cereals are “whoa foods,” maybe for a holiday or vacation treat.

Getting grade-school children in the habit of drinking lowfat milk instead of whole milk, eating an apple a day, or choosing carrot sticks or raisins as an after-school snack makes them more likely to continue those habits when they’re old enough to choose foods on their own, said Northwestern University dietitian Linda Van Horn, who led the new study.

But children must have access to tasty, healthy choices, stressed Van Horn: If only hot dogs are served at the baseball game, that’s what they’ll eat.

Already, the nation has 9 million children ages 6 to 16 who are overweight, according to federal health officials. Overweight children usually grow into overweight adults, at increased risk of heart disease, diabetes, asthma and other disorders — not to mention the childhood turmoil of being teased and left out of sports and other fun activities.

The new study tracked 595 children, half of whom had received, with their parents, special education on how to make healthier food choices. Three years later, kids who had attended the nutrition classes were eating more “go” foods than their peers in every food group except fruit, Van Horn reports in the June issue of the journal Pediatrics. They also ate fewer “whoa” foods, with one exception: pizza. And for desserts, they were more likely to pick lower-fat options like frozen yogurt.

The $2.6 million “We Can!” campaign aims to extend those food lessons, and encouraging more physical activity, to all 8- to 13- year-olds.