(Press-News.org) Policy changes in California to make the food and beverages that compete with school meal programs more healthy for students appear to have improved childhood overweight/obesity prevalence trends, although improvement was better among students attending schools in socioeconomically advantaged neighborhoods, according to an article published online by JAMA Pediatrics.
Many school districts have adopted policies to regulate so-called competitive food and beverages (CF&Bs) because of childhood obesity. California has enacted among the most comprehensive CF&B policies in the nation, requiring substantial changes to food in public schools. The changes have been aimed at sugar-sweetened beverages, sweeteners, fat, portion size and calories from fat, according to study background.
Emma V. Sanchez-Vaznaugh, Sc.D., M.P.H., of San Francisco State University, and coauthors compared overweight/obesity prevalence trends before (2001-2005) and after (2006-2010) CF&B policies were implemented in California public elementary schools. The study included more than 2.7 million fifth-grade students in 5,362 public schools from 2001 to 2010. The authors looked at whether childhood overweight/obesity prevalence trends differed by school neighborhood income and education levels.
The authors found the prevalence of overweight/obesity among fifth-graders was slightly higher each year from 2001 to 2005 (43.5 percent, 44.1 percent, 45.1 percent, 45.3 percent, 46.6 percent, respectively) and then stabilized from 2006 to 2010 (46.2 percent, 45.9 percent, 46 percent, 45.9 percent, 45.8 percent, respectively).
Each year from 2001 to 2010, the prevalence of overweight/obesity also was highest among students attending in schools in the least advantaged neighborhoods and lowest among those students attending schools in the most advantaged neighborhoods. For example, in 2010, the overweight/obesity prevalence was 52.8 percent in the lowest-income neighborhood compared with 36.2 percent in the highest-income neighborhood, according to study results.
After the policies were enacted, trends in the prevalence of overweight-obesity leveled off among students attending schools in more disadvantaged neighborhoods but declined among students attending schools in neighborhoods with the highest income and educational levels, according to the study.
"These findings suggest that CF&B policies may be crucial interventions to prevent child obesity but the degree of their effectiveness is also likely to depend on influences of socioeconomic resources and other contextual factors within school neighborhoods. To reduce disparities and prevent childhood obesity among all children, school policies and environmental interventions must address relevant contextual factors in neighborhoods surrounding schools," the study concludes.
INFORMATION:
(JAMA Pediatr. Published online May 4, 2015. doi:10.1001/jamapediatrics.2015.0781. Available pre-embargo to the media at http://media.jamanetwork.com.)
Editor's Note: An author made funding/support disclosures. Please see article for additional information, including other authors, author contributions and affiliations, etc.
Media Advisory: To contact corresponding author Emma V. Sanchez-Vaznaugh, Sc.D., M.P.H., call Beth Tagawa at 415-338-6745 or email btagawa@sfsu.edu.
To place an electronic embedded link to this study in your story Links will be live at the embargo time: http://archpedi.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?doi=10.1001/jamapediatrics.2015.0781
In the history of continental drift, India has been a mysterious record-holder.
More than 140 million years ago, India was part of an immense supercontinent called Gondwana, which covered much of the Southern Hemisphere. Around 120 million years ago, what is now India broke off and started slowly migrating north, at about 5 centimeters per year. Then, about 80 million years ago, the continent suddenly sped up, racing north at about 15 centimeters per year -- about twice as fast as the fastest modern tectonic drift. The continent collided with Eurasia about 50 million ...
Researchers at the Babraham Institute and the Francis Crick Institute have developed and used a new technique to join the dots in the genomic puzzle. Just as a dot to dot puzzle needs to be completed to visualise the full picture, the researchers' analysis connected regulatory elements called promoters and enhancers and showed their physical interactions over long distances within the mouse and human genomes. The ability to map promoter-enhancer interactions in the human genome has huge potential in understanding the genetic basis of disease.
Our development as an embryo ...
Cambridge, MA - States will gain large, widespread, and nearly immediate health benefits if EPA sets strong standards in the final Clean Power Plan, according to the first independent, peer-reviewed paper of its kind, published today in the journal Nature Climate Change.
The researchers analyzed three options for power plant carbon standards. The top option in the study prevents an expected 3,500 premature deaths in the US every year, with a range of 780 to up to 6100. It also averts more than a thousand heart attacks and hospitalizations annually from air pollution-related ...
Researchers at the University of Rochester have shown that defects on an atomically thin semiconductor can produce light-emitting quantum dots. The quantum dots serve as a source of single photons and could be useful for the integration of quantum photonics with solid-state electronics - a combination known as integrated photonics.
Scientists have become interested in integrated solid-state devices for quantum information processing uses. Quantum dots in atomically thin semiconductors could not only provide a framework to explore the fundamental physics of how they interact, ...
Using brain tumor samples collected from children in the United States and Europe, an international team of scientists found that the drug panobinostat and similar gene regulating drugs may be effective at treating diffuse intrinsic pontine gliomas (DIPG), an aggressive and lethal form of pediatric cancer. The study, published in Nature Medicine, was partially funded by the National Institutes of Health, the Department of Defense, and more than 25 nonprofit foundations devoted to finding cures for childhood brain cancer.
"Our results provide a glimmer of hope for treating ...
Huntington's disease is caused by a mutation in the Huntington's disease gene, but it has long been a mystery why some people with the exact same mutation get the disease more severely and earlier than others. A closer look at the DNA around the Huntington's disease (HD) gene offers researchers a new understanding of how the gene is controlled and how this affects the disease. These findings set the stage for new treatments to delay or prevent the onset of this devastating brain disease.
Huntington's disease is a genetic disorder that gets passed down in families, but ...
Malmö, Sweden, May 4, 2015 -- A team of researchers from Sweden and the United States have examined the potential role of the family environment and neighborhood factors on mental health outcomes in a new study published in Journal of Psychiatric Research.
The study includes highly detailed data on over 500,000 children in Sweden and covers a timespan of more than a decade.
A total of 542,195 children were tracked for 11 years for incident internalizing (anxiety and mood) and externalizing (ADHD and conduct) disorders. During the course of the study, 4.8 percent ...
Considering geological time scales, the occurrence of biogenic shale gas in Sweden´s crust is relatively young. An international team of geoscientists (led by Hans-Martin Schulz, German Research Centre for Geosciences GFZ) found that biogenic methane in the Alum Shale in South Sweden formed due to deglaciation around 12.000 years ago. Moreover, the formation processes were due to complex interactions between neotectonic activity and the occurrence of a deep biosphere. Applying a new hydrogeochemical modelling approach, the specific methane generation process was unravelled ...
Hyalella azteca are invertebrates that are widely used for sediment and water toxicity studies. Investigators have found that H. azteca collected from sites influenced by agricultural/urban runoff are as much as 2-times less sensitive to pyrethroid insecticides than lab-grown H. azteca. In contrast, the insecticide sensitivities of H. azteca collected from undeveloped sites beyond the influences of agricultural/urban runoff were similar to those of lab-grown populations.
The results suggest that standard compliance testing of ambient waters, stormwater, and agricultural ...
In a 4-year study of 178 pre- and 329 postmenopausal women, investigators found that women's sexual functioning was moderately stable over time. The main predictors of changes in sexual functioning and satisfaction were desire and arousal, highlighting their role as the main "players" in women's sexual health.
The study also found that despite the potentially impairing effects of menopause and menopausal transition, sexual satisfaction and functioning in postmenopausal women can be improved and sexual problems can show spontaneous remission.
"From a clinical standpoint, ...
