A recently published study suggests that First Lady Michelle Obama has been firing blanks in her war on childhood obesity.
The report, which appears in the January 2012 issue of the journal Sociology of Education, reveals that researchers were unable to establish a correlation between obesity and attending a school where “competitive foods”—aka, soft drinks, candy bars, and chips—are available to students. (A link to the article abstract is here.)
The research team was headed by Jennifer Van Hook, professor of sociology and demography at Pennsylvania State University. In the longitudinal study, they tracked the body mass indexes of 19,450 students from fifth through eighth grade. The team compared the BMIs of children in schools where junk food was sold and in schools where it was not. They evaluated children who moved into schools that sold junk food with those who did not, and children who never attended a school that sold snacks with those who did.
No matter what combination of variables they tried, the researchers could never find a conclusive link between eating junk food and obesity.
Van Hook is quoted by the New York Times as concluding, “Food preferences are established early in life. This problem of childhood obesity cannot be placed solely in the hands of schools.”
Nor in the hands, one might add, of well-meaning but misguided first ladies.
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