Diet Str egies: Stop Childhood Obesity    

"And the sins of the father shall be visited on his children, and his children's children unto the third and fourth generation...."

As a source of weight-loss inspiration, the Bible is pretty much overlooked. But there's tons of useful stuff: fasting, high-quality aerobic activities like wandering in the wilderness, and manna from heaven, the ultimate low-fat snack. And God's warning from the book of Exodus is tailor-made for dads: Just conjure it up the next time you're hoisting a greasy load toward your slavering gob while your kids look on. And, oh yes, they're watching. Very closely. The American Dietetic Association says that parents are kids' number-one role models (40 percent cite them as such), far outpacing the next-closest finisher: those bad boys of work-release, professional athletes (8 percent). Seventy percent said they turn to their parents for information on nutrition and healthy eating. So if you can set a good example with your forksmanship, you have a fighting chance at countering the 30 billion dollars a year the food industry is spending to sell a chubby lifestyle to you and your kids.

So far, the marketers are winning. One in seven American kids is currently overweight or obese, a jump of 50 percent in the past 20 years. That's nine million Whopper Jr.'s spilling out of their buns, growing to full Whopperhood. (Researchers at NYU have correlated the plump jump to the invention and marketing of the supersized meal, in the late '70s.) At the rate we're going, by 2011 the fat kids on the playground will be banding together and making fun of the few remaining skinny ones. At least, until the large generation succumbs to diabetes, heart disease, colon cancer, and other diseases associated with too much flesh and not enough action. The USDA figures that kids consume around 1,900 calories a day, even though they need only 800 to 1,300. Urp.

Kind of makes the Happy Meal stick in the throat, doesn't it?

"A lot of parents tell me, 'My kids don't like healthy foods,' " says David Katz, M.D., an associate clinical professor of epidemiology and public health at the Yale medical school. "Well, 'finicky' is not an excuse. You never hear a parent say, 'My child doesn't like to look both ways before he crosses the street.' They tell him to do it. They should do the same thing with dangerous foods. More of today's kids will die of complications from bad foods they eat than they will from tobacco, drugs, and alcohol." Even slim kids are at risk of heart disease and cancer. And exercise habits and dietary smarts are the way to avoid them. You, more than anyone else, can help your kids do that. Yeah, you.

Here is where you can take a page from the Old Testament playbook: Throw some commandments at 'em. Okay, so you're not God. But with the help of the smartest people in the weight-loss game, you can keep the whole family out of caftans.

1. Thou Shalt Move Thy Ass
According to a University of Buffalo study, a kid's risk of obesity doubles for every hour of television he watches every day, and drops 10 percent for every hour of exercise he gets daily. And given that the average kid watches television for 21 hours a week, that's a lot of doubling going on—and not just in chins. Michael Levine, M.D., a pediatric endocrinologist at the Cleveland Clinic's children's hospital, notes: "It's very difficult to eat while you're playing football; it's easy when you're just watching it on a screen." Perhaps your kid sips an extra sugary drink or two while he mashes the remote; each additional soda increases his risk of obesity by 60 percent, according to a study done at Children's Hospital in Boston.

Now might be a good time to show equal parts backbone and understanding, Dad. Make a deal: For every hour they spend on the GameCube, the computer, the Xbox, the Game Boy, or the tube, they have to put in an hour of physical activity. You can easily track their tech time, and buy cool stuff, too. A new line of TVs from RCA is equipped with KidPass, a system that lets you set the number of minutes each kid can watch. When the time is up, the box shuts down. It might be the best tech investment you make this year, or in his lifetime. The best way to monitor exercise time, of course, is to be a sports hero: Play with your kid. The Men's Health Family Workout gives you an exercise plan that (a) is fun and (b) can make the entire family healthier.

2. Thou Shalt Honor Thy BMI
By correlating height and weight, body-mass indexes give adults a clear picture of where they ought to be (BMIs between 18.5 and 24.9), where they're starting to get in trouble (25 to 29.9), and where they've crossed a big fat line (30 or higher). It's vitally important to measure BMI in kids as well. The sooner you and your kid stop and reverse any weight gain, the less likely she is to be permanently stuck on the down side of the health teeter-totter. A score that puts her above the 85th percentile for her age means she's on the wrong side of a weight shift of historic proportions.

3. Thou Shalt Know Thy Alternatives
"A healthy diet isn't about deprivation," says Dr. Katz. "Parents need to know the best foods in every category—chips, cookies, juice—that their kids are going to want to eat."

Dr. Katz has supplied just such a list in his book, The Way to Eat (Sourcebooks, $22). Some of his kid-zone selections:

Cold cereals. Post raisin bran, Multi-Bran Chex, Life
Cookies. Barbara's, Frookie, Health Valley
Snacks. Stonyfield Farm low-fat drinkable yogurt, Health Valley granola bars, Jello fat-free pudding
Frozen desserts. Nonfat frozen yogurt, fruit-juice bars, fat-free Fudgsicles

4. Thou Shalt Guard the Gates
You have the power to shut bad foods out. If a food is high in refined sugar or high-fructose corn syrup, don't let it into your car or the front door of your house. Children won't be able to bug you for junk that isn't in the cupboard, and you won't guiltily snarf it when they're in bed, either. Along those lines, it's never too early to limit saturated fats and trans fats (partially hydrogenated anything on the label), which are arterial disasters for everybody you care about. Conversely, if a food is acceptable, there's seldom any reason to control portions, so the food battles fall, right along with everybody's BMI numbers.

5. Thou Shalt Not Create Unnecessary Fat Cells
One doomsday scenario has it that our current nine million fat kids will find love, have nine million supersized weddings, and produce in excess of 18 million obese children, causing the collapse of beds, shoe arches, and civilization as we know it. It could happen, in fact, but it doesn't have to. "You can change the way inherited genes will act," says Dr. Levine. "The environment overrides the gene template."

One way it does this is through fat-cell creation. Sometime early in a child's life—it could be the first few years, or even the first few months—your kid begins forming fat cells, with the total number being determined by the kinds of foods he's eating. If he's overstuffed as a baby, he'll have more fat cells. And that's like laying in a big supply of luggage before a long vacation: Your wife will fill every bag. So it is with those infinitely expandable fat cells. It's never too early to watch the ingredient lists. Another key to a healthy, lean baby: breast milk. And it comes in such attractive packaging. (Studies show that babies fed with formula are more likely to become overweight as kids.)

6. Thou Shalt Not Drive Thru
Researchers at BYU doled out pedometers to 1,954 children in three countries. The tallies: Swedish boys average 18,346 steps a day, Australian boys take 15,023, and American boys take 13,872. You'll never guess who the fattest ones are. One lesson: On the rare occasions when you eat fast food with your kid, at least commit to hoofing it from car to restaurant. Once you reach the counter, fight the national obesity trend by ordering from our special edition Eat This, Not That for Kids.And now that you've established the principle of one-foot-in-front-of-the-other, find excuses to interject it into other aspects of your kid's life. He can walk to the neighbor's house, ride a bike to school. If he doesn't love his bike, skateboard, inline skates, or scooter, buy him the coolest one you can afford. Foot and bicycle power appeal to kids' sense of independence, and while they're escaping you, they fill up their lives with exercise.

7. Thou Shalt Not Take Thy School-Lunch Program in Vain
According to the Journal of the American Dietetic Association, 77 percent of principals said their schools had contracts with soft-drink companies—virtually floating most school activities on a sticky brown tide. And just consider the fact that Coke has signed on as a "sponsor" of the National PTA, and has a seat on the board. Can the Coca-Classroom be far behind? "Vending machines are like Superfund sites with push buttons," rages Dr. Katz.

He advises that a few shrill parental voices can go a long way toward bringing around the principal, school board, and local politicians on the matter of scouring the schools of crap food and crap-food advertisements. Be a part of the trend to detoxify cafeterias. You should also take an interest in your kid's school-lunch choices; in with the whole fruit, 1 percent milk, baked chips, and peanut butter, out with the doughnuts, soft drinks, french fries, and mystery meats. One small change can produce a big difference: The Center for Science in the Public Interest points out that kids who drank a cup of 1 percent milk instead of 2 percent each school day would cut almost 19 pounds of fat during their school careers. If your kid uses a swipe card for cafeteria purchases, tell him you'll be checking on what he buys; many schools offer printouts.

8. Thou Shalt Not Be a Slave to Thy Hypothalamus
Picture yourself at the Thanksgiving table, having stuffed yourself in the usual way. You push back, give your belly a pat, and say, "What's for dessert?" That's your hypothalamus in action, according to Dr. Katz. Here's how it works. The gland at the base of your brain contains hunger regulators for the main flavors that make up a diet: sweet, salty, bitter.

At one point, it drove Homo sapiens to sample a lot of different foods; when you filled up on one, you stopped eating and sought another, thereby ensuring a good variety of nutrients. Now the huge food companies do our grazing for us, and their food scientists combine sweet and salty flavors within single foods; Cheerios have nearly as much salt as pretzels, but it's masked by sugar. As a result, you'll just keep on eating, because you'll never exhaust your taste in any single area. "Every processed food has chemical flavor enhancers to keep you eating," Dr. Katz says.

There are a few ways to avoid becoming hypothalamic slaves:
- Eat just one snack at a time, so you'll tire of it and close the box.
- Buy foods with short lists of simple ingredients, to cut down on chemical hypothalamus bafflers such as sodium chloride, sodium benzoate, sodium bicarbonate, mon0sodium glutamate, and artificial flavors.
- Plan meals around flavor themes, so you know when to lay down the fork. Citrus on the chicken, and in the salad.
- Eat whole fruits, grains, and vegetables, not their superprocessed Frankenstein cousins.

9. Thou Shalt Avoid Fad Diets
Don't succumb to every crazed weight-loss notion that floods the airwaves. If you're on cabbage soup one week and the alphabet diet the next, and in the meantime yo-yoing between guiltily overweight and grumpily lean, your kids will think that food is complicated. It shouldn't be; more often, it's a matter of simplifying choices. "It's not an arcane story," says Dr. Katz. "Kids can get used to a healthy diet. That's what parents do for their children." The key: Train them in bedrock principles they can sustain for a lifetime.

10. Thou Shalt Act as a Family
If you want to help your kids eat better, exercise better, live better, they can't go it alone. You have to do it with them. If the kitchen is filled with junk, and one shelf is nutritional nirvana, the result is preordained: Junk wins. The same goes for junk diets, junk lethargy. Bad currency drives out good. So do what dads do best: Launch a good-food-and-exercise crusade, but with a spirit of adventure, a sense of humor, a lust for discovery, and, above all, a policy of togetherness. If you pitch it right, the whole gang will sign on. The sins of the fathers will most assuredly be visited on their children, but here's the beauty part: So will their righteousness.

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