While we are used to seeing public service announcements about childhood smoking and drug use, weight is still a taboo subject. One nutritionist describes a recent television commercial that showed a young boy gorging in front of the TV and putting on weight before the audience's eyes. Many health providers criticized the ad for making fun of fat kids and potentially scaring others into not eating for fear of becoming fat themselves. Joanne Ikeda, a Nutritional Education Specialist at the University of California at Berkeley, sees obesity as the number one nutritional problem for children. She tells parents to allow kids to decide when they have had enough to eat.
Infants cry when they are hungry, then they satiate themselves according to their needs.
Somewhere along the way humans lose this capability. A lunch box with a bologna sandwich, potato chips, cookies and a fruit-punch beverage is completely missing two food groups and contains an overload of fat, sodium and sugar. Prepackaged lunches such as Oscar Mayer's Lunchables have similar problems. A meal consisting of bologna, crackers, cheese, and chocolate chip cookies provides 31g of fat-as much as three tablespoons of butter, almost half the maximum amount of fat an adult should eat in a day. A much more healthful lunch is a sandwich made from lean sliced turkey, the child's favorite fresh fruit, an oatmeal cookie or graham cracker and low-fat milk.