It takes a lot of work to grow perfect-looking Christmas trees. Photo: capn madd matt.

Last week, I went to buy a Christmas tree at the Cal Forestry Club’s annual tree sale fundraiser, and instead of full, lush conifers that tapered to a perfect pointy crown, I found only short little trees, with trunks that meandered left and right and branches that were sparse and uneven. These weren’t the picked-over remains—all the trees the club had sold that week resembled Charlie Brown’s tree. The Berkeley students from the Forestry Club described these trees as “free range,” in contrast to trees from Christmas tree farms, which are painstakingly grown to be perfect.

Members of the Cal Forestry Club had chopped these trees down themselves, in the Sierra Nevada Mountains. The trees would have been chopped down anyway, Berkeley student and Forestry Club member Jamie Richards explained. They were growing in clumps that had to be thinned out to reduce competition between trees. Sierra Pacific Industries owned the land and donated the trees for the fundraiser. A handful of students packed 463 trees into a 24-foot U-Haul and steered it down an icy Highway 50 towards Berkeley.

The trees they were selling were red firs, white firs, and incense cedars. I figured they didn’t look like typical Christmas trees because they were the wrong species. Jamie said that most Christmas trees are indeed different species—noble firs, grand firs, Douglas firs, and spruce are popular choices—but their perfect structure has more to do with the way they’re grown than their genetic makeup.

On a Christmas tree farm, it takes a lot of work to get the trees to grow. The trees are “hedged” or pruned so they grow full and bushy, and their trunks are trained to grow straight. Most conifer species grow at high elevations, but most Christmas tree farms are at lower elevations; the trees need to be nurtured with fertilizer so they’ll grow in soil and weather conditions that are not the same as the conditions where they evolved.

Jamie pointed out that farmed trees are not as hearty as they would be in their native environment, and they’re more susceptible to diseases and damage from pests. Tree farms must apply pesticides and fungicides to prevent damage that could turn the needles yellow and make the trees un-sellable. Depending on the species and the environmental conditions, it takes 6-10 years for a Christmas tree to grow; some of the diseases that can afflict Christmas trees don’t develop until the tree is 4-5 years old, at which point the growers have already invested a lot of work.

Christmas trees came into fashion in the early 1900s. People usually chopped a wild-growing tree, until Christmas tree farms grew in numbers the 1930s and 1940s. Today, 98 percent of non-artificial Christmas trees sold worldwide come from Christmas tree farms.

The trees sold by the Cal Forestry Club are the two percent. They grew wild, and they look it. Nevertheless, I bought one. The tree barely reached my shoulder and had only a few branches, so it was easy take it home in the trunk of my tiny car. Once I added a string of lights and a few ornaments, though it wasn’t a perfect Christmas tree shape, it looked perfectly festive.

We all perceive the world through our own lens. (You might think those curtains are ugly) Our point of view, or cognitive perception, is largely shaped by our experiences, our beliefs, emotions, moods and the actions around us. In that way, you choose how you see. And how we traverse the world and how we interact with others is shaped by this perspective. For instance, does the world look different when you are happy or sad? Does the traffic you are in seem worse when you are late or angry? Doesn’t the sun shine brighter when you are in love?

Cognitive perception can be manipulated too. Perhaps you are feeling blue because you are being laid off and losing your job? You might be feeling embarrassed, hurt or concerned about the future. It might feel like it’s the end of the world. But with a small twist of your point of view, the perspective might change. How does it compare on scale to other people or events around you? For example, how does the pain of losing your job compare to the illness or loss of a loved one? How would losing your job feel compared to, say, losing your ability to walk? Pretty small concern then.

Most visual and cognitive perception is unconscious. It’s not something we focus on as we slog through our daily routines. But for people in wheelchairs, perspective is often in the forefront. When you navigate the world on wheels, you have to think about how you get in a building, get out of bed, make breakfast, get into your car to get to work — how you do so many of the things able-bodied people take for granted.

The world looks different from a sitting position too. When you are in a wheelchair, you always have to look up to talk with your standing fiends and family. That shapes your perspective, both visual and cognitive.

So thinking about perspectives, one of the things that struck me most was the inspiring attitudes of Tamara Mena and Austin Whitney, the two exoskeleton test pilots we featured in our story. These two young people were both dealt major blows while in the prime of their lives. Both were vibrant and active teenagers when each was involved in catastrophic automobile accidents. Both had to deal with painful rehabilitations. And both faced a future where they probably would never walk again. And through that, both remain courageous, upbeat and positive. Where many might have given up, these two are charging into the future.

So put yourself in their shoes and think about what it might mean to be able to stand up and change your perspective. What would it mean to be able to look your friends in the eye, to stand and fully embrace your family again? Think about how the room looked different when you stood up from your computer.

The future of exoskeleton technology is marching forward. We saw Austin Whitney walk across the stage to receive his college diploma. More is hopefully on the way. Maybe someday soon we’ll also see paraplegics walking down the aisle at their weddings and walking onto airplanes to fly off on their honeymoons. Or less dramatically, maybe soon paraplegics will be able to regain the mundane pleasure of standing at the kitchen counter, making peanut butter sandwiches for their kids.

Fantasy? Too much to hope for? It’s all in your perspective.

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Web Extra – Tamara Mena: Exoskeleton Test Pilot

When she was 19 years old, Tamara Mena suffered a debilitating spinal injury that left her paralyzed from the chest down. Today she is working as an exoskeleton "test pilot" at Ekso Bionics, putting this new technology through its paces. Someday exoskeletons like the one she is testing may give paraplegics the ability to stand up and walk. This is her story.

Additional links:
Tamara Mena
Austin Whitney
Berkeley Robotics and Human Engineering Laboratory
Ekso Bionics
Tibion | Makers of the Tibion Bionic Leg
The Austin Exoskeleton Project at the University of California, Berkeley
Engineers to help paraplegic student walk at graduation
Berkeley Bionics to launch eLEGS

Stem cells in the gut of Drosophila divide in response to food. Photo courtesy of John Tann

Researchers investigated how stem cells in the gut of the fruit fly respond when different amounts of food are present. They found that when food is abundant, stem cells in the gut divide more rapidly, increasing the size of the gut as long as food continues to be available. When food is removed, the cells stop dividing and the gut shrinks down again.

“The real surprise was that the fruit fly intestine is capable of secreting its own insulin,” said principle investigator David Bilder in a press release. “This intestinal insulin spikes immediately after feeding and talks directly to stem cells, so the intestine controls its own adaptation.”

Insulin is also the primary signaling molecule for converting blood sugar into usable energy in muscles, and storing it as fat.

What the current findings mean for human physiology or chronic overeating is still unknown, but it raises many new questions regarding the role of intestinal stem cells and metabolism.

Cycads are considered living fossils from the days when Jurassic dinosaurs browsed upon them. New research has found that modern cycads are much younger than that. Specimen in Strybing Arboretum in Golden Gate Park. Photo courtesy Tantek Çelik of Flickr under Creative Commons license.

"Living fossil" is a term for species alive today that have been unchanged for millions of years. Among the animals, the horseshoe crab is considered a classic example, looking just like its remotest ancestor from early Paleozoic times.

Among the plants, people often cite the cycads: a line of fernlike, cone-bearing shrubs that have looked the same since the Permian Period nearly 300 million years ago. Their heyday was in the Jurassic, but today they have dwindled to about 300 species in 11 genera, still with the same old looks and lifestyle. However, in a new paper just published in Science Express, a team led by UC Berkeley paleobotanist Nathalie Nagalingum used genetic methods to show that nearly all of today's cycad species are actually quite young.

Nagalingum, whose team included five other plant specialists, tested two independent gene lines in 199 different cycad species to estimate the speed and timing of their evolution. They also used fossil cycads to calibrate the genetic results, yielding a pair of "timetrees" of cycad evolution. The timetrees show just six slender stems, representing ancestral cycad lineages, that extend from the deeper past beyond the end of the Mesozoic Era (and the dinosaurs) 65 million years ago. The stems burst into thick bundles of twigs, like the explosion of skyrockets, much later in geologic time.

This news overturns a favorite theory that today's cycad species inherit their characteristics from evolutionary pressures during the days when dinosaurs browsed upon them. Today's species instead arose in the late Miocene, about 10 to 5 million years ago. Nagalingum's team surmises that the reason was rearrangements of the continents that interrupted tropical ocean currents, causing the world to have stronger seasons. Even though the cycads responded to this change with a burst of speciation, two-thirds of existing cycad species are nevertheless on the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species. They don't have good tools to thrive in today's colder, drier world. Call them victims of plate tectonics.

This research means that cycads aren't really living fossils—relict species bearing the marks of a world now vanished—but ordinary twigs on the bushy tree of life. Only one line of cycads does appear to date from the dinosaur age, little changed to this day: Bowenia spectabilis and B. serrulata, of coastal Queensland, Australia. That's not enough to support the dinosaur-browsing theory, but Bowenia leaves are commonly used in the floral trade for an echo of ages past.

Cycad at UC Berkeley Botanical Garden. Photo courtesy James Gaither of Flickr under Creative Commons license.

You can visit a variety of cycads in Strybing Arboretum in Golden Gate Park and in the UC Berkeley Botanical Garden, among other places.

By one estimate, there are 10 million alcoholics in the US. Photo Credit: Ralf Roletschek

Joseph McHugh is an artist who lives in San Francisco. Like his father before him, Joe had always been a drinker. But recently, it started to pick up.

“It sort of got out of control,” he says. “It wasn’t starting at five o’clock, it was starting at noon, when I’d have a couple shots and so forth.”

He was having blackouts, he says. He remembered nothing, but people would tell him stories of what he’d done. “Like what?” I ask him.

“Things I don’t want to even mention, ok?”

What brought McHugh VA Medical Center in San Francisco was a heart attack. It literally terrified him into sobriety. He's been dry a month now, slogging through recovery with other men whose lives have also become simply untenable.

Listen to the QUEST radio story The Search for Alcoholism's Miracle Drug

McHugh’s story is a familiar one to doctors who treat alcoholism, like Peter Banys, Director of Substance Abuse Programs at the VA.

“It's always a crisis,” Banys says. “And it can be a marital crisis, a family crisis, or job termination.”

Alcoholism is a very treatable disease, says Banys. Because of all the recent research, people like McHugh have more options than ever, including AA, therapy, and medication, which can be effective in preventing relapse.

Still, there are some challenges. First of all, the meds are a tough sell, Banys says. He says his patients often think of their alcoholism as a moral weakness.

“One of the things we hear a lot,” he says, “is I don’t want to depend on a drug. They’ve been depending on a drug for 25 years, they don’t want to depend on ours.”

Another problem is that drugs that once seemed promising have often fallen short.

Take Naltrexone, which was approved in 1995. Naltrexone blocks the brain’s opioid receptors, which make alcohol feel good.

“That was the great hope,” says Banys. “It kind of crumbled in our hands.”

On many people, Natrexone has no effect all. They’re just wired differently.

And that’s proven to be a useful insight.

“One of the things that we have to make clear is that alcoholism is almost certainly not a single disease or disorder. I believe that in the near future, we will be talking about “the alcoholisms.”

The fact of these “alcoholisms” means that researchers are now targeting specific kinds aspects of brain chemistry that might be involved in alcoholism.

Howard Fields directs Human Clinical Research at the Gallo Center in Emeryville, an institute devoted to alcoholism and addiction, affiliated with The University of California, San Francisco.

What interests him is something familiar to many of us: Impulsivity. Different people are impulsive to different degrees, just like rats, and other animals. From an evolutionary standpoint, this makes sense.

“You want someone who would throw themselves on the hand grenade and save the lives of other people,” says Fields. “The same people who wind up in prison might be completely different in a battlefield situation. They might be the heroes.”

But in regular life, impulsivity can be a dangerous trait to have, says Fields. “If you score high for impulsivity, you are at greater risk to actually become an abuser or an addict. There’s no question about that.”

Fields says that in some people, impulsivity can be traced back to a specific gene. If you have it, you’re more likely to be impulsive. And it turns out, there is already a drug on the market that targets a function of this gene. It’s called tolcapone, and it’s prescribed to people with Parkinson’s disease.

So what Fields aims to find out is whether tolcapone might actually make people less impulsive. And if that’s true, whether it can help people limit their drinking. This research is now in human clinical trials.

Of course, even if the drug works for some people, it won’t work for everyone. The fact that there are “alcoholisms,” as Peter Banys put it, means that there may never be a single miracle drug.

But whatever the future holds, the goal of treatment will always look more or less the same: More people like Joseph McHugh, who have made the life-changing decision to get and stay sober.

McHugh says it’s hard to know what things will be like, once he’s out of rehab and back with his family. But he’s optimistic.

“I’m sort of glad that everything is where it is now. Because it is a change. It’s a necessary change."

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The nose of the star-nosed mole is much more sensitive than the human hand. Credit: Dr. Ken Catania, Vanderbilt University

Pain is the most common reason for trips to the doctor's office. So it makes sense that pain treatment is a huge part of our healthcare system, costing more than 100 billion dollars a year. But how exactly pain works is still a mystery in many ways.

Like any normal 9-year-old, Maddie Burkhardt was playing outside with her friends last summer, racing around in a pedal go-cart.

"And my foot slipped and it went under the go-cart. Like it got bent backwards," she says.

Maddie broke a bone in her foot. So, her mom, Danielle, took her to see a podiatrist, who put her in a series of casts.

"And every time he took the cast off, he said 'ok, you should feel much better now.' And she was just like 'no, it's killing me," says Danielle.

As the weeks went by, it became clear that Maddie's pain wasn't normal. "She would not allow anything to touch her foot at all. And we didn't really know what was going on," says Danielle.

Listen to the QUEST radio story The Science of Pain

Even a light touch, like the wind blowing, was incredibly painful. "It felt like there was knives in my foot. Like a big elephant smashing on your foot or something," says Maddie.

Maddie was diagnosed with complex regional pain syndrome and ended up in a special treatment program at Lucile Packard Children's Hospital in Palo Alto.

Dr. Elliot Krane, who heads the program, says "most of the time, pain is the signal that there's a problem and it's a useful sensation to have and a protective one."

But sometimes, our body's warning system goes haywire, like in Maddie's case. Nerve cells send out pain signals even when there's no reason to.

"It's a terrible pain problem," says Dr. Krane. "And it's one that we really don't understand the origins of. And because we understand so little about it, our therapy of it is also very rudimentary.

Krane says Maddie, like most patients, went through a slew of treatments, like physical therapy and pain medication. It took months to recover. "I can't exactly run really yet, but I can walk faster and I can play with my friends and do a lot more," Maddie says.

For the most part, doctors rely on opiates like morphine to control pain. But those drugs aren't very targeted. The challenge is that pain is very difficult to study. "There's other things and other processes in the body which are measurable in some objective fashion: heart rate, blood pressure, temperature. But how do you measure pain?" asks Dr. Krane.

Looking to Nature for Solutions

In a lab at the University of California-Berkeley, Diana Bautista has the same questions about pain. "Many people are trying to figure out how to do this. And we decided to look to nature to solve this problem."

Bautista is an assistant professor of biology at the University of California-Berkeley. She's peering into a large plastic tub filled with dirt.

A star-nosed mole at UC Berkeley. Photo: Kristin Gerhold, Bautista Lab.

"So, if you look here in the corner of the dirt, you can see that there's a star-nosed mole. Pretty interesting looking, right?"

Star-nosed moles have a very unique look. Their large pink nose has 22 finger-like tentacles that they use to feel for food in the dark tunnels where the live.

"What we don't see, that you need special high-speed video to see, is that they're actually tapping very rapidly the surface," says Bautista.

Compared to our fingertips, the mole's star has 10 times more nerve cells. "It's much more sensitive than the human hand."

That lack of sensitivity in human skin makes it difficult to study pain, because our nerve endings are so spread out.

We also have about 20 different kinds of nerve cells. Some detect pain, some detect light touch. Others detect hot and cold. "And so it's very difficult to study one in isolation or to separate the pain cells from the light touch cells."

That's where the star-nosed mole comes in. Its star is densely packed with light touch cells, but not a lot of pain cells. So Bautista says, studying tissue samples of the mole's star can reveal the differences between nerve cells.

"How does one cell feel the prick of the pin and the other feel the feather? We don't know what happens in those nerve endings," says Bautista.

Bautista says knowing what happens in normal nerves can tell a lot about when nerves don't work normally – like when diabetes patients experience numbness or cancer patients have hypersensitivity. That comes down to the biochemistry inside the cells. For that, Bautista is also studying another organism.

Peppers Targeting Nerve Cells

"These are Szechuan peppers that are from the Chinese prickly ash," Bautista says, handing me the peppercorns.

"Chew them a little bit in the front of your mouth."

As I chew, my tongue becomes slightly numb. "It feels like a little buzzing, tingling sensation," says Baustista.

The peppercorns aren't hot, but they do have chemicals that are working on my sense of touch. "We know that they target special receptors and cause those nerves to be excited just as if somebody was tickling your tongue," says Bautista.

That's a trick that humans could copy. "By indentifying the molecular mechanisms, we could really go in and design better drugs and come up with better therapies and alternatives for treating conditions like chronic pain," she says.

Bautista hopes the research will lead to more targeted pain drugs, so patients like Maddie Burkhardt will have an easier recovery.

Check out the star-nosed mole in action:

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Scientists are trying to mimic the ability of spiders to produce ultra-strong fibers without the use of heat or toxins.

Underwater glue, molecular-sized solar cells, self-assembly, insect communication, swarm behavior, genetic algorithms – what do these biological phenomena have in common? These are all inspiring innovation through a process called "biomimicry." Biomimicry is budding in the Bay Area in the form of new business technologies, design think tanks, and K-university curriculum.

By bringing biologists to the design table, biomimicry offers solutions for increasing sustainability of products, processes, and systems. Popular Science published an article in March interviewing Biomimicry Guild's Tim McGee on how bio-inspired design is reshaping the future.

Biomimicry is gaining widespread recognition for its interdisciplinary approach to innovation. The College of Environmental Design at UC Berkeley hosted Janine Benyus's talk on biomimicry and the future of architecture and environmental design last February. Recognizing the opportunities that abound through interdisciplinary collaboration, IDEO and Autodesk designed and built a digital library of nature's strategy's called AskNature. Conventional businesses are even being challenged to address and improve organizational, IT, and design challenges using concepts and expertise from octopi and flamingos.

Despite the buzz, actually designing and building things that are biomimetic is quite challenging. Stanford lecturer and designer Jeremy Faludi attests, "Most designers, engineers, architects, and other people who build things just don't know that much about biology and the natural world, and when they do, there's often a gap of capability in available materials manufacturing methods, and economic systems." Even the most creative people can get stuck thinking along certain lines. Defining a design problem is challenging and finding strategies in nature that inspire solutions can be even trickier.
Researchers study swarm behavior for more efficient computing.

A new interdisciplinary course at UC Berkeley, "How Would Nature Do That?", tackles these challenges through project-based learning. Students from architecture, engineering, business, science, and design disciplines learn from each other and nature to implement innovative solutions to sustainable design challenges. By offering case studies of biomimicry, along with guest lectures and a series of design challenges, instructors Tom McKeag, Dr. Robert Full, and Dr. Lewis Feldman hope students will gain exposure to multiple methods for design.

Dr. Robert Full uses bio-inspired design and established the UCB Center for Interdisciplinary Bio-inspiration in Education and Research (CIBER).

A few weeks ago I visited the class, which is held at the Cal Design Space. Several student teams were previewing some of their ideas; one team was tasked with designing a sustainable humidity control system for a greenhouse. Discovering that the Hercules beetle changes color with changes in humidity, the team conceptualized a filtration membrane that activated upon sensing changes in color. In addition, I was delighted to hear renowned biomechanist Dr. Steven Vogel of Duke University give a presentation on his previous work. His talk inspired students to consider designing passive HVAC systems based on his observations of limpets, sand dollars, fish nostrils, rhododendrons, desert spiders and many other examples.

The course is sponsored by Qualcomm’s MEMS Technology Unit and is a joint effort of the College of Natural Resources, and the College of Letters & Science. Highlights from the course include guest lecturer Dr. Michael Weinstock from the Architectural Association of London and author of the "Architecture of Emergence," as well as visits to the CIBER lab, tidepooling at Duxbury Reef in Bolinas and a field trip to Qualcomm in San Jose.

Biomimicry education can also be found in other sustainability courses and centers in the Bay Area. Cabrillo College's sustainable cultures class all incorporate biomimicry principles into design thinking. The Monterey Bay Aquarium hosts the daily show 'Whales to Windmills': Inspiration from the Sea, a Biomimicry Institute production. Biomimicry curriculum produced by BioDream Machine teaches students at the Marine Science Institute in Redwood City to observe different adaptations and functions within San Francisco Bay marine life. Even the Cal Academy of Sciences devotes a website which introduces bio-inspired technologies.

Qualcomm's Mirasol display technology uses the same principle of light interference to produce color as does a butterfly wing.

The Bay Area is also a hub for biomimicry technology. Moss Landing-based company, Calera, manufactures a concrete that sequesters CO2 by emulating sea coral. San Rafael's PAX Scientific developed fluid-handling devices based on the efficiencies of natural fluid flow. And in Napa, Aquagy uses anaerobic digestion and microalgae to treat wastewater in a carbon-negative process.

With any new method of design comes rounds of trial and error. But that's not stopping investors and researchers. JWT, a prominent marketing communications brand, announced that biomimicry is the #11 thing to watch in 2011. With its widespread recognition, biomimicry is certain to inspire real innovation to today's design challenges.

QUEST on KQED Public Media

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Artist's rendering of exoplanets around a star. (Credit: NASA)

The Earth may not be as unique as we think it is. That's according to findings announced today by UC Berkeley. Astronomers there believe that Earth-sized planets may be more abundant in the universe than previously thought.

For five years, a team of scientists lead by UC Berkeley watched 166 stars, similar in size to our Sun and all within 80 light years of Earth. In all, they discovered extra-solar planets or "exoplanets" orbiting 22 of the stars. Some are as large as Jupiter while others are about three times the size of Earth, the smallest planet they can detect. Smaller planets were found more frequently than the larger planets.

"We found smaller planets in spades," said astronomer Andrew Howard of UC Berkeley. Using the data, Howard and his team created a statistical model to predict what other planets might be present. "We extrapolated that trend down to Earth-sized planets."

Howard says the data shows that nearly one in four stars like our Sun could have Earth-sized planets. "This is really the first quantitative estimate of the fraction of sun-like stars that have Earth-like planets. Before, the guesses were all over the map. Some people thought it was 100%. Some people thought it was one in a million."

The 33 planets found in the study orbit very close to their stars, meaning temperatures there are most likely too high to support life. The discoveries were made with the Keck Observatory in Hawaii using 10-meter ground telescopes. The planets were found using the "wobble" of the stars – the subtle movement that occurs when a star is pulled by the gravity of its orbiting planets.

The announcement joins a number of exoplanet discoveries in recent months, including NASA's finding of two exoplanets in August. Today's findings were published in the journal Science.

Howard says while the ultimate goal is to find Earth-like planets that could have liquid water, this finding is an important first step. "People have wondered for millennia: is the Earth common or is it rare? And we're starting to learn that the Earth is not a one-off in the universe. It may have cousins out there."

For more on how scientists find exoplanets, check out this QUEST story.

QUEST on KQED Public Media.

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Kids at schools with the School Lunch Initiative ate more vegetables, fruits and demonstrated greater knowledge of nutrition and health.

A recent report issued by scientists from the Atkins Center for Weight and Health at UC Berkeley examined the impact of the School Lunch Initiative (SLI) on the eating behaviors of children transitioning from elementary school to middle school. The SLI is sponsored by the Chez Panisse Foundation, founded in 1996 by Alice Waters.

The SLI is a system-wide program that includes cooking and gardening classes, integration of school lunch with food and nutrition curriculum, and improvements in campus food and dining services. The report examined the eating behavior of children at schools enriched with the SLI compared with children at schools with similar foods but without the program. The research followed fourth and fifth graders for three years to see the effects of the program during the transition from elementary school to middle school, since this is a time when healthy eating often deteriorates in children.

According to the report, SLI may have the potential to reverse the deterioration of healthy eating habits that children typically exhibit as they transition to adolescence. Compared with children in control schools, kids at schools with the SLI ate more vegetables, fruits and demonstrated greater knowledge of nutrition and health. Students in the SLI also showed greater preference for vegetables, particularly green leafy vegetables. Over the same period, children in schools without the SLI decreased their intake of fruits and vegetables both in and out of school. These trends were still apparent one year after completion of the SLI, when the students were in seventh grade.

The report is the first examination of the effectiveness of integrated school lunch programs on the healthy eating behaviors of children over an extended period. With the growing epidemic of childhood obesity, comprehensive school lunch programs have tremendous potential to improve the health and habits of developing children.

Though body mass index (BMI) improvements were not found in the current study, small sample size and measurement limitations may have made changes statistically undetectable. Since the trends observed in the eating habits of children in the SLI would predict a decreased risk for obesity, further studies are warranted to pursue the value of the program for improving health and body weight.

With the recent attention on the importance of school lunch programs (October 11-15 has been declared National School Lunch Week by the USDA), data on programs like SLI will be critical and could serve as a model for more broad government programs to improve nutrition at schools.

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