Childhood Obesity Awareness Month was filled with awareness of carrots, exercise, grains and gardens--everything except an awareness of poverty as a primary cause of obesity in kids.
By Diane Pagen, LMSW
Last month was Childhood Obesity Awareness Month, but no child is any healthier because of it. Of every three U.S. children, one is obese. That is because the thing that would do most to help American children to weigh less—their families having more money for nutritious food—is consciously omitted from the “awareness” campaign.
Take three major websites one gets information about how to combat childhood obesity. Doctors call obesity a disease of poverty. Yet at choosemyplate.gov, you are told that nutrition is entirely in your hands, and the website’s My Plate feature provides “resources and tools for dietary assessment, nutrition education…and the online resources and tools can empower people to make healthier food choices for themselves and their children.” At the USDA website, there are bright icons for Let’s Move!; Fruits and Veggies: More Matters; and The People’s Garden, which are communal gardens set up in communities to bring the experience of growing food to people (oddly, the people’s gardens don’t let “the people” take food directly—it’s donated to food banks instead). And healthfinder.gov has lists of what to say to people to make them want to “support obesity prevention.” None include pointing out that a family’s food stamp allotment is lower than the USDA’s lowest official estimate of what it takes to feed a family in the United States. The best document to create knowledge of why children are obese is the USDA’s Cost of Food at Home graph. It’s full of information about how much money it takes to eat. But it has no dancing apples or cute pictures of kids holding carrots and isn’t used in the awareness campaigns.
More disturbing still in the failure to name poverty as a primary cause of obesity is the nod to some groups having more obesity than others. “Even greater disparities exist among young Hispanics and people of color,” we are told, but this statement is misleading. The disparity is not between “people of color” and whites, it is between the poor and the non-poor. We are resistant to acknowleging the role of poverty in childhood obesity because if we acknowledge it, we may then be asked to do something about it. So we tackle the safe stuff—like teaching kids what broccoli looks like—that is of little consequence but won't require uncomfortable admissions that all this time policy decisions have kept many kids malnourished.
The last time this country talked seriously about the role of poverty in childhood hunger was back in the 1950s and 60s, when doctors fanned out over the nation to interview Americans in the poorest regions about their daily diets, then came back to a concerned Congress with nauseating stories of children not eating. In 1964, even a President went to low income regions to see how people were living. No such interest appears to exist today among legislators, though perhaps once we are done with our latest spending spree in Iraq, some may turn their attention to this epidemic health threat.
In the 1920s and 30's, the U.S. Children’s Bureau analyzed all policy, actual and proposed, for its effects on the well-being of children. For the past several decades, it has changed its focus to child welfare law, adoption and foster care only. This results in all kinds of policy hurtful to children taking place without intervention or criticism from the Bureau—like, say, the most recent cut to the Food Stamp benefit, cuts to the Women, Infants and Children program, and stuff like that.
What is the point of taking poor kids to the White House garden to let them taste carrots and tomatoes, if we know when they get home their parents can't afford food of that quality? The combined cash and Food Stamp assistance for a family in D.C., for example, amounts to an income that reaches only 56 percent of the poverty line.
The main information sources on childhood obesity steer clear of the poverty problem, even though poverty is more of a predictor of obesity than whether or not children “get moving.” Anyway, how can a child who has not eaten decently participate in all this exercise? No one suggests the non-poor exercise without eating, or after having filled up on cheap calories like chips and soda, but that’s what we are asking of these kids. We can't continue to cut food stamps and income support, and act like it has no hand in creating five year olds who can't see or touch their toes.
The USDA official food plan says that a “low cost plan” for food for an eleven year old child is $209.30 a month. The most a family living in poverty gets per child is $129 a month. In New York City, where I do social work, each person gets more like $95—regardless of the fact that as the child grows larger, more money is required. The USDA plans also rely on the assumption that all food will be prepared at home to keep the family's food expenses low. But this is unreasonable, since a majority of low income people are required to work outside the home, and will have to buy at least some of their food outside. Yet this year, Republicans and Democrats made a $9 billion dollar food stamp cut the law that made it even harder for 850,000 Americans to eat. And it is estimated that childhood obesity costs $14 billion in medical costs each year. Maybe we can put the $9 billion we saved toward paying those extra medical bills.
Not all families who are poor enough to qualify get food stamps. In the Bronx, only 66 percent of eligible families get them. In Texas, there are 1,400,000 poor people who don’t get them even though they are eligible. Louie Gohmert, a Texas legislator, told the press that the proof that Texans don’t need Food Stamps is that so many of them are obese. His comment shows extreme ignorance of the medical experts's findings on obesity. Giving him the air time to say that to millions of impressionable Americans probably did more to increase obesity than a truckload of McDonald’s Happy Meals ever could.
Awareness campaigns keep people busy, but they are dangerous. They make people feel like they’re doing something to solve a problem, while the problem grows larger. Being “aware” of obesity while ignoring poverty, causes us to remain silent every time a policy decision is made that makes families poorer. If we ignore that being poor is a cause of obesity, we actively contribute to making kids sicker and fatter. The way to fight obesity is to make sure every family has enough money to feed its children. Now that’s something to be made aware of.