WIC Program Goes on a Diet

The Department of Agriculture Thursday added fruits, vegetables and whole grains to a nutrition program aimed at low-income women and their children, while also offering new alternatives such as soy beverages and tofu. The changes to the Women, Infants and Children program also include reduced amounts of milk, cheese, eggs and juice.
"This is a historic day for USDA," said Eric Steiner, the department's associate administrator for special nutrition programs. "It's the first time in 30 years that the food packages for WIC have been revised to better meet the nutritional needs of women, infants and children." The changes will be effective next February, and state agencies will then have 18 months to implement them. The program serves about 8 million people. Steiner said WIC recipients typically have diets deficient in whole grains, fruits and vegetables. He said there's also a prevalence of obesity among the population.
The USDA based the changes on suggestions by the Institute on Medicine with the caveat that the revisions not increase costs. The Institute of Medicine is a branch of the National Academy of Sciences, an independent organization that advises the government on scientific matters. The reductions of other products, such as dairy, were made both to keep the cost of the program from rising and to better meet the nutritional needs of recipients. "The revised packages have less saturated fat and cholesterol, and this is accomplished by reducing the quantities of milk and cheese," Steiner said.
Under the WIC program, people receive vouchers for specific foods, averaging about $39 a month in 2007. Under the revisions, vouchers for fruits and vegetables will be $6 for children, $8 for women and $10 for fully breast-feeding women - with the goal of encouraging more women to breast-feed. Products such as soy beverages, tofu, tortillas and brown rice are being offered as alternatives to meet the demands of more culturally diverse populations. The department received more than 46,000 public comments since first proposing the changes last year, and most were supportive, Steiner said. Anti-hunger advocates praised the changes. Jim Weill, president of the Food Research and Action Center, said the addition of whole grains, fruits and vegetables will reduce obesity and "help nutritionally vulnerable children form healthy eating habits from an early age."
The dairy, egg and fruit juice industries backed the changes, but lamented the reduced roles for their products. Carol Freysinger, executive director of the Juice Products Association, said the reductions could "send an inappropriate and unsubstantiated message about the benefits of 100 percent juice consumption."
According to government estimates, annual milk and cheese sales under the revised program will be about $960 million, a reduction of roughly $400 million. Juice sales would be reduced by nearly half, to $281 million, while egg sales would drop from $120 million to $67 million. Chris Galen, a spokesman for the National Milk Producers Federation, called the lost sales to dairy significant. "And we don't think it's prudent from a public health standpoint," he said. Howard Magwire, a lobbyist for the United Egg Producers, said he was hopeful the industry could make up for some of the losses with WIC recipients spending other money on eggs.

Source: http://www.dietseasy.info

Study: Overweight Kids Risk Early Heart Disease as Adults

Overweight Kids Become Adults With Sick Hearts; Huge Problem Seen by 2035
Overweight children grow into adults at high risk of early heart disease and early heart death, a long-term Danish study shows.
The finding isn't a prediction -- it's hard data from very long-term data on 10,235 men and 4,318 women born in Copenhagen, Denmark, from 1930 through 1976.
But given the size of the ongoing obesity epidemic, the findings predict a huge wave of future heart disease.
Researchers Jennifer L. Baker, PhD, and colleagues at Copenhagen's Center for Health and Society painstakingly compiled records for virtually every schoolchild in the city and matched them with national health records.
The bottom line: After the age of 7, overweight children have an increased risk of adult heart disease. The higher a child's body mass index -- BMI,which relates weight to height -- the higher that child's risk of becoming an adult with heart disease.
"What we found was at the age of 7, for both boys and girls, the risk was moderate," Baker tells WebMD. "By age 13, the risk increased dramatically."
A child does not have to be hugely obese to be at increased risk.
"We compared the average 13-year-old boy, who weighed 96 pounds, to a heavier boy of the same height who weighed 121 pounds," Baker says. "Even for a normal-weight boy, there is a one-in-nine risk of heart disease by age 60. For the heavier child, this risk becomes at least one in six. We find that highly significant."
Pediatric cardiologist Tom Kimball, MD, of Cincinnati Children's Hospital, says the findings are a warning that parents must take childhood weight problems seriously -- even in young children.
"This is not an adult problem. It is a kid problem," Kimball tells WebMD. "This study has a big message for parents."
During the 46 years of the study, an overweight child's risk of becoming an adult with a sick heart did not change much. The problem did not so much appear to be the modern diet as the simple fact of being overweight as a child.
Tsunami of Heart Disease Predicted
Modern diets being what they are, child obesity is increasing at an alarming pace. Overweight children tend to become overweight teens, and overweight teens tend to become adults with heart disease.
A computer simulation by Kirsten Bibbins-Domingo, PhD, and colleagues at the University of California, San Francisco, suggests that today's teen obesity epidemic means that by 2020, 30% to 37% of 35-year-old men and 34% to 44% of 35-year-old women will be obese.
By 2035, there would be up to a 16% increase in heart disease cases, with over 100,000 cases due to obesity, the researchers predict.
Both the Baker and Biggins-Domingo reports appear in the Dec. 6 issue of The New England Journal of Medicine.
In an editorial accompanying the studies, Harvard researcher David S. Ludwig, MD, PhD, predicts that by 2050, the U.S. obesity epidemic will cut Americans' life span by two to five years. That effect would be equal to the effect of all cancers combined.
"We lack anything resembling a comprehensive strategy for encouraging children to eat a healthful diet and engage in physical activity," Ludwig writes.
He suggests that a sensible strategy would:
- Regulate junk-food advertising
- Fund healthy lunches and physical activities at school
- Restructure farm subsidies to reward production of nutrient-dense produce rather than calorie-dense produce
- Require that insurers cover programs to prevent and treat child obesity
At the bottom of the Pandora's box of child obesity, Baker finds hope.
"Even though we are showing that children's body size puts them at risk, there is still a ray of hope in what we find," she says. "Because risks are moderate at age 7 and increase by age 13, it suggests that helping these children attain and maintain appropriate weight -- even during this short time -- can really improve their future outlook."
Source: http://www.happykidsclub.info/