In Brief:
School-based efforts at better nutrition, more exercise and improved education about healthy living can help kids who are most at risk for obesity keep the weight off, compared to children in schools without such programs, a new study suggests.. "The intervention, surprisingly, did not result in a [population-wide] reduction in overweight or obesity," said lead researcher Gary D. Foster, a professor of medicine and public health and director of the Center for Obesity Research and Education at Temple University, Philadelphia. For the study, Foster's team randomly assigned more than 4,600 students from the 42 schools to a diet, exercise and information program, or to a program where only their weight and height was assessed. Foster said that it is intriguing that the rate of overweight and obesity dropped by 4 percent regardless of whether the school had an anti-obesity program in place or not. Several factors may be at work in this decrease in overweight and obesity even among those children, Foster noted, including children putting more attention on their weight. "However, those who perceive value in school-based interventions - and I am among these - will focus on the obvious pattern in an array of secondary outcomes, including reductions in body fat and insulin levels, which in turn would be expected to reduce diabetes risk," Katz said..
