Obesity and Convenience Stores

Obesity Concerns spur calls to limit new convenience stores in South L A.

from Paul Murphy's Posts - Obesity Thunder Bay by Paul Murphy

Obesity concerns spur calls to limit new convenience stores in South L.A.
The proposed rules, an outgrowth of last year's city restrictions on new fast-food restaurants, are prompted by links found by researchers between snack foods and obesity in poor communities.
October 12, 2009|Jerry Hirsch

Links found by researchers between snack foods and obesity in poor communities are prompting new calls for more regulation of convenience stores in South Los Angeles.

The proposed new regulations under discussion are an outgrowth and expansion of last year's city restrictions on new fast-food restaurants in a 32-square-mile area of South Los Angeles. The area is home to about 500,000 residents, including those who live in West Adams, Baldwin Hills and Leimert Park.
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Motivated by new data focusing on convenience stores, civic activists and a City Council member favor limiting the development of new convenience stores.

A study by Santa Monica think tank Rand Corp. published in the research journal Health Affairs last week said calories from snacks were a likely culprit of higher obesity rates in South Los Angeles. The authors also found that South Los Angeles had a dramatically higher concentration of the type of small convenience store that sells caloric snacks than other sections of the city.

Separately, researchers looking at the shopping patterns of schoolchildren in urban Philadelphia found that more than half the 800 students they surveyed reported that they shopped at a corner store at least once a day, five times a week. Almost a third visited a store both before and after school.

On average, the students spent about $1 and purchased 356 calories of snack foods and drinks each visit. Chips, candy, sugary beverages and gum were the most frequent purchases, according to a study published online today. It also will appear in the November edition of Pediatrics, a medical journal.

How to curb such purchases is a top priority for policymakers attempting to reduce the obesity rates in poor communities.

"We need to look at a moratorium on these convenience stores," said Lark Galloway-Gilliam, executive director of Community Health Councils Inc., a nonprofit health policy and education organization in South Los Angeles.

The Los Angeles City Council is set to consider a proposal that would limit the density of these small food stores in South Los Angeles, said Councilwoman Jan Perry, a proponent of regulations adopted last year establishing a moratorium on new openings of fast-food restaurants whose 9th District includes much of South Los Angeles.

The proposal, part of the developing Southeast Los Angeles Community Plan, would prohibit such small neighborhood markets from being closer than one-half mile from one another unless they sold fresh fruit and vegetables.

Although a half-mile separation may sound dense, it represents a restrictive requirement in her council district, which is only 14 square miles, Perry said. The proposal would only affect new development and would go to the City Council next year, she added.

"It's a carrot and a stick approach," Perry said.
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Despite the studies that link snack calories with higher obesity rates in poor communities, regulating the location of stores might not be helpful, said Roland Sturm, who coauthored the Rand study with colleague Deborah Cohen.

The Rand study said that almost 26% of the residents of South Los Angeles are considered obese, according to the study. That compares with about 18% of the residents of Los Angeles County who live in higher-income neighborhoods.

"Clearly these stores are a source of excess calories, especially in children," Sturm said, "But people need access to food that is reachable."

His research found that residents of South Los Angeles are far more likely to walk or use public transportation to shop for food than Angelenos who live in other sections of the city, and that limits their choices.

"I would be hesitant to prohibit the development of these stores," Sturm said, because residents of the community don't have other easy-to-reach places to purchase food to be consumed at home.

The industry also is against more regulation.

"Convenience stores, whether they be a 7-Eleven or other, provide needed products and services to communities, especially lower income or areas with high crime," said Margaret Chabris, spokeswoman for Dallas-based 7-Eleven Inc., which has 50 stores within the Los Angeles city limits.

"Sometimes larger supermarkets won't venture into the tougher neighborhoods, but mom-and-pop stores, locally run convenience stores, will," she said.

"They provide food, groceries, paper products, money orders, ATM services and over-the-counter medicine around the clock. They can also be a safe haven when someone on the street or in the neighborhood is in trouble and needs a place to go or make a phone call."

The chain also sells sliced fruit and other healthful snacks in addition to chips and soda, Chabris said.

South Los Angeles has 58 small food stores per 100,000 residents, according to the Rand study. West Los Angeles has only 14.

It's not clear why there is such a difference. It could be that the lack of traditional supermarkets in South Los Angeles -- only three compared with 10 in West Los Angeles -- has left a vacuum that the small stores fill. And this has increased the availability of sugar- and fat-laden snacks, some policymakers say.

In the Philadelphia study, Temple University professor Kelley Borradaile and colleagues from the Food Trust, a Philadelphia nonprofit that works to improve access to affordable, healthful food, surveyed students in grades four to six outside 24 corner stores in an economically poor part of that city.

"There needs to be more education in the schools as to what is a healthy snack," Borradaile said. "These kids need to learn how to walk through the corner store and make good decisions."

--

jerry.hirsch@latimes.com

twitter.com/latimesjerry

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Food Politics Chocolate Milk : Soda in Drag.

Food Politics Chocolate Milk: Soda in Drag

from Paul Murphy's Posts - Obesity Thunder Bay by Paul Murphy

Food Politics
Chocolate Milk: Soda in Drag
Hannah Wallace
December 15, 2009 Hannah Wallace

I’ve been thinking a lot about public school lunches lately—not just because it’s a subject that’s perpetually in the news these days. For the past few months, I’ve been volunteering at Public School 157 in Bed-Stuy, for a grassroots non-profit called Wellness in the Schools. I’m part of the salad bar squad: I slice and chop veggies, prepare bean and pasta salads, and serve the kids both. Though New York City lunchrooms still have a long way to go—we can’t get local produce or any olive oil, for instance (using subpar soy oil for salad dressings)—at least these first, second, and third graders of all ethnicities are enthusiastic about eating carrots, cucumbers, and celery. It’s only taken a few months, but now it’s the rare student who passes the salad bar by without at least trying something.

So it was with great interest that I listened to this NPR segment on how the milk industry is lashing out at parents at this Boulder, Colorado school for taking chocolate milk off the menu.

“Chocolate milk is soda in drag,” one mom (called “the renegade lunch lady”) says to NPR reporter Jeff Brady, noting that it has 3.1 grams of sugar per ounce. (Soda has 3.3.)

Apparently, this school isn’t the only one to ban chocolate milk. The dairy industry, worried about losing more milk drinkers nationwide, has rather desperately launched a “Raise your hand for chocolate milk” campaign on Facebook including this propaganda-filled video. (Hmmm… I wonder how much these dieticians and actors were paid to say that chocolate milk is just as healthy as regular milk?)

Has it really gotten so bad that parents can’t persuade their kids to drink plain whole milk? Oh—that’s right, whole milk is not an option anymore, at least in New York City public schools where city education officials removed it from cafeterias in 2006. At PS 157, the only choices kids have are low-fat or skim milk and low-fat chocolate milk. If I were them, I’d probably choose chocolate milk, too. Who wants to drink blue-ish skim milk or watery-tasting 1% milk?

The truth is, kids are not getting fat from drinking whole milk. (When was the last time you saw a 3rd grader guzzling whole milk? I think that’d actually be cause for celebration.) I’m with Nina Planck on this subject—you need the saturated fat that’s in whole milk to absorb the calcium and fat-soluble vitamins in milk. Whereas sugar (and an early addiction to it) leads to everything from ADD to cavities to diabetes.

As we say at the P.S. 157 cafeteria, one step at a time. We’ve got the kids eating fresh veggies on a daily basis—maybe next semester we’ll figure out how to get some seasonal produce from New York state farms. And maybe, like that Boulder school, we can tackle the chocolate milk issue soon.

Second-grader Ella Lyons says it best, “No one’s going to get regular milk if we have chocolate milk, because, I think, they’re going to like it better because it tastes better…But it’s not good for you, so I think we shouldn’t have chocolate milk.”
Hannah Wallace

Hannah Wallace is a Brooklyn-based journalist who writes mainly about integrative health, food, and travel. She is a frequent contributor to Body + Soul and Salon.com, and her articles and book ...
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Obesity and Shared Accountability.

Too Fat to create a loving home environment .

from Paul Murphy's Posts - Obesity Thunder Bay by Paul Murphy

June 24, 2007
Too fat to love a child?

This heartbreaking story in the Sunday Herald Sun is another example of government agencies not knowing what’s best, or acting in the best interests of people ... especially if they’re fat. There is no credible science to support a government official’s decision to base adoption eligibility on BMI.

Yet, a couple eager to give a loving home to a child, and told they’d make wonderful parents in every way, went through three years of bureaucratic red tape to become eligible to adopt, only to be told she was too fat. Until she loses 110 pounds, they won’t be allowed to adopt a child. Here’s their story:

Woman ‘too fat to adopt child’

WOULD-BE mother Kylie Lannigan has been told she is too fat to adopt a child. Mrs Lannigan, 29, and husband, Dave, 37, are devastated after complying with three years of bureaucracy to become eligible. Mrs Lannigan, who is [5 ft. 6in.] tall and weighs [277 pounds] ...

“They (two Department of Human Services adoption counsellors) ... said everything was looking good and we would be wonderful parents, but that my weight was holding me back from adopting. “They gave me a BMI (body mass index) chart. [and] said 'You are here' and drew a dot on the chart and then said, “When you get to here give us a ring' and they would come and start the assessment again.

“By the time I get down to that weight I will be too old - they're asking me to lose more than [110 pounds]." ...

“I was disappointed when they said it," Mr Lannigan said. “It's discrimination." Mrs Lannigan works about 40 hours a week as a chef at the local hotel bistro. Her husband is a vineyard supervisor. The homeowners have been together for 13 years. She has polycystic ovarian syndrome, which can lead to weight gain and difficulties getting pregnant.... “I walk to work and Tafe everyday. I have been tested for heart disease and diabetes and I am okay."

Mr. Lannigan is right, that’s all this is. They are a stable, loving couple with good jobs and able to provide a nurturing home for a child, and most of all, are desperate for a child to love. That’s all that matters to an orphaned child.

While the government agency said their decision was based on health concerns, there are several false assumptions at work here that have nothing to do with health.

First of all, the popular belief that because she's fat this mother is more likely to be sickly and die prematurely and, therefore, would not make a good candidate, is not supported by any evidence, as we've shown repeatedly here. Given the findings of the longest, prospective studies and clinical trials, as well as the soundest populations studies, she actually might have a survival advantage.

To show how illogical the concept of mortality risks are applied when it comes to fat women, even the fattest women are more likely to outlive normal weight men. “Being male is now the single largest demographic risk factor for early mortality in developed countries,” according to Daniel Kruger, a social psychologist at the University of Michigan Institute for Social Research. Yet, no one would deny the important role that fathers can play in a child's life, too.

The second insinuation here is that her PCOS is due to her being fat and makes her more likely to have debilitating illness or die prematurely. This is a popular set of misbeliefs. Polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS) is one of the most common endocrine disorders among women of reproductive age, affecting between 4% and 8%, although may be as high as 30% in women with secondary amenorrhea, according to Joyce King, CNM, RN, FNP, PhD in a recent issue of the Journal of Midwifery Women’s Health. The cause is still unknown, but a genetic component has been suggested by the familial pattern seen in some cases. While obesity is associated with PCOS, however, it is a side effect of PCOS. Similarly, weight loss does not make the PCOS go away!

“Although certain subjective symptoms allegedly are reduced following weight loss, there is no solid evidence that weight loss is an effective treatment for PCOS,” according to obesity researcher Paul Ernsberger, Ph.D., an associate professor of nutrition at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland. Nor is there any evidence that achieving long-term weight loss is even possible, safe or would improve lifespan.

PCOS has been associated with higher rates of cardiovascular risk factors, leading to the popular belief, even among healthcare professionals, that women with PCOS must, therefore, be more likely to die prematurely or have higher morbidities. Not so. Risk factors are not disease or even predictive of disease.

Researchers in England noted that the actual prevalance of heart disease in women with PCOS had never been reported, so they set out to test this hypothesis and to determine the actual cardiovascular mortality and morbidity among 786 women diagnosed with PCOS compared with 1,060 age-matched control women over a 32-year period. Using not only clinical records and death certificates, but also clinical examinations of a representative sample, they found that while the women with PCOS had higher levels of several cardiovascular “risk factors” (hyperlipidemia, increased waist:hip ratio, diabetes, hypertension, etc.), their actual all-cause and cardiovascular mortality were similar to women in the general population. This observed paradox — high levels of coronary risk factors with no appreciable increase in heart disease or premature deaths — “challenges our understanding of the etiology of coronary heart disease in women,” they concluded.

Popular beliefs about fat people, with no credible evidence, are behind countless initiatives to “incentivize” them to lose weight and adopt “healthy lifestyles.” But the unmistakable fact is that cruelty done against someone simply because of how they look is never in the interest of their health or wellbeing

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Scottish Doctors Reject Chocolate Tax Call. Dec 16, 09

from Paul Murphy's Posts - Obesity Thunder Bay by Paul Murphy

Scottish Doctors Reject Chocolate Tax Call

3:24pm UK, Thursday March 12, 2009
Doctors in Scotland have rejected a call for chocolate to be taxed to help Britain get to grips with its obesity epidemic.

Pile Of Chocolate

Chocolate can be a dangerous food, one doctor believes

Dr David Walker earlier called for the tax because he said he believed that chocolate was a "major player" in the problem of the country's expanding waistlines.

Taxing the treat would raise its profile as an unhealthy food which could contribute to weight-related conditions including diabetes, high blood pressure and back pain, the Lanarkshire GP said.

"What I'm trying to get across is that chocolate is sneaking under the radar of unhealthy foods," said the doctor from Airdrie Health Centre.

"I am disappointed that the motion was not supported by the conference, however, I am pleased that it has stimulated debate on obesity and the worryingly high levels of diabetes in Scotland.

180 chocolate bars

Chocolate: a sweet treat?

"A little of what you fancy may do you some good, but as nearly one in four people in Scotland are obese, lack of physical activity, an unhealthy diet and larger portion sizes are clearly taking their toll on the health of Scotland."

Diabetes UK said the key to tackling the UK's obesity problem was information and education.

The health charity's Natasha Marsland said: "We don't believe that a 'chocolate tax' is the right approach to help diminish the number of people who are overweight or obese in the UK.

"Instead, better education and information are needed to help people make the right food choices.

Taxing chocolate was the subject of today's webchat - see the replay.





"People should also be encouraged to increase their physical activity as a sedentary lifestyle increases the risk of developing Type 2 diabetes."

Food industry leaders were also against the idea, saying such a proposal would result only in lighter wallets, not smaller waists.

Food and Drink Federation spokesman Julian Hunt said: "Introducing regressive taxes on the foods that consumers love would result only in lighter wallets, not smaller waists - particularly as we already have to pay VAT on all our chocolate purchases.

"There is no evidence to suggest that such 'fat taxes' would actually work in reality.

"Indeed, when the BMA debated a similar motion in 2003 its members voted against such an idea on the grounds that such a taxation policy would have no effect on obesity, would hit lower income groups hardest and would be a bureaucratic nightmare."

What I'm trying to get across is that chocolate is sneaking under the radar of unhealthy foods.

Dr David Walker, Lanarkshire GP

James Auton of the Chocolate Society which has around 6,000 members said his group was against such a tax.

"A distinction needs to be made between the lower quality confectionery available in large bags and bars containing high levels of sugar and fat, and higher quality chocolate," he told Sky News online.

"The latter generally has a higher cocoa content, and which, when enjoyed in moderation and as part of a balanced diet, may be beneficial to both body and mind.

"Ultimately, I do not agree with the call to tax chocolate as I think it is both missing the point, and unlikely to yield results."

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Comments to the story

*

The taxation idea is indeed ridiculous. However, to reject ANY connection between chocolate and overweight or obesity is to enter into denial. A former chocoholic, I cut my consumption by around 80% and demonstrated very clearly that it had long prevented me losing weight.

If you can't stop eating chocolate, how about learning to like REAL chocolate, unadulterated by milk or other fatty contaminants? Look for at least 85% cocoa, and if you can, work up to the delight of 98% bitter chocolate, which has the added benefit of being very low on sugar. Milk chocolate is for those who don't really like the taste of chocolate unless it is masked by various kinds of fat. Two glasses of milk in every bar? Sorry, I prefer and pay for chocolate. If I want milk I'll drink some.

As for the myriad of vaguely chocolate-flavoured bars with silly names - they mainly use SYNTHETIC chocolate flavours to enliven what are otherwise just packets of fat.

Posted By :Bill Report This
*

Dr David Walker, what planet are you on, its the food industry that is the problem, too many lovely sticky creamy cakes and puddings , chocolate has got nothing to do with it. Kids don't excercise any more only there hands on the game boxes, there is no outside activities like footie in the park unless supervised by parents

Posted By :Jan Report This
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Why should we be taxed for other people's greed? There is only one cause of obesity and that is eating and drinking too much. For the rest of us chocolate is a treat, maybe once a day, maybe once a week, but not in excess. Tax clothes according to size, that will encourage them to eat less.

Posted By :Jill Report This

Read more comments (Page Expands)

*

Once again we hear utter nonsense from someone who hasnt got a clue on the realities of life. Put a tax on bread, put a tax on Jam, put a tax on cocoa pops. Everything kills you if you eat to much. The only thing this doctor is achieving is extra revenue for the govrnment theives. It`s alright for him, he wont notice the tax on a bar of chocolate, many people will. What a waste of publicity.

Posted By :Mo Report This
*

i think the huge fry ups in the mornings and the fact that we like frying the choc bars have more to do with the weight problems than the choc itself.

Posted By :sophie nicol Report This
*

Yet another proposed tax,......

it's madness the government will soon control everything, i see that unless you 'opt-out' they will claim your body parts upon death for transplants.

Join the Facebook group "Say NO to Tax on Chocolate"

Posted By :Martyn Report This

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Why would an expert on Diabetes take a stand against this issue? I agree that education is the key , but at some point we need to try new ideas and new concepts. Our community needs to promote a Fat Conversation.