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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You read that right. In a new study out in Nature Neuroscience, scientists tinkered with a single gene in a mouse and made it less likely to get fat. Finally I can eat as many Double Stufs as I want without worrying about gaining weight. If scientists can turn what they've learned into a pill, that is.

How'd the researchers do it? By changing one part of the mouse's brain, the hypothalamus. One of the hypothalamus' many jobs is body weight regulation. So it was a logical place to start.

The scientists couldn't go in with a wrecking ball and tear the hypothalamus apart. It is an important part of the brain with lots of different duties. They needed to something pretty subtle so the mice would survive but be thinner.

What they did was to keep certain cells in the hypothalamus from being able to release a neurotransmitter called GABA. This was enough to make a mouse better able to maintain a lower weight.

This study suggests that GABA's normal job in the hypothalamus is to keep mice (and probably us) from burning too much energy. Makes sense in the wild. But is quite a pain in my cubicle.

Now, we can't go changing human genes (at least not yet). But perhaps scientists can come up with a pill that will do the same thing. A pill that keeps AgRP neurons from releasing GABA in the hypothalamus.

This is as hard as it sounds. But now that scientists know what to do, pharmaceutical companies will be able to apply all of their firepower to solving this problem. Given the potential market, if anyone can find a medicine for restricting weight gain using this finding, they will.

Before I get too excited, though, I want to see what happens to these mice as they age. Burning calories makes free radicals which damages DNA which causes aging and can cause cancer. Perhaps burning more calories this way might generate more free radicals.

Of course even if it does, maybe we could just take the pills with cranberries or some other anti-oxidant. Or maybe Nabisco can make an Oreo laced with antioxidants…

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