Keeping Kids Fit and Trim

Nonprofit groups seek to reverse the rise in overweight youngsters

In Colorado, Girl Scouts are using pedometers to log 3,318,000 steps this year — the distance

between their state capital and Savannah, Ga., the birthplace of Juliette Gordon Low, founder of Girl Scouts of the USA.

In Columbus, Ohio, day-care providers are reading copies of the popular picture book The Very Hungry Caterpillar to the young children they care for to help prompt them to make smart food choices.

In Oklahoma City, officials of a local Indian clinic are taking kids on field trips to Pizza Hut to teach them how to count calories.

Through numerous efforts such as these — paid for by private, community, and corporate foundations — nonprofit organizations are trying to reverse an alarming rise in obesity in the United States, particularly among children.

The U.S. surgeon general, in a high-profile report two years ago, called obesity one of the nation’s most pressing health problems. The report found that in the past 20 years, the percentage of overweight children ages 6 to 11 has nearly doubled, to 13 percent, and the percentage of overweight adolescents ages 12 to 19 has nearly tripled, to 14 percent. It blamed increasingly sedentary lifestyles, as well as unhealthy eating habits, and it warned that excessive weight gains had led to a rise in children suffering from diabetes, heart disease, and asthma.

“There is no issue in the health arena, looking across the board, for which the trajectory is rising so rapidly in the wrong direction,” says J. Michael McGinnis, a senior vice president of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, in Princeton, N.J., which expects to spend about $100-million in the next five years to help youngsters control their weight. “This is a catastrophe waiting to happen.”

Concern About the Emphasis on Fat

While grant makers have long supported exercise and nutrition programs, only in the past few years have many started to explicitly support efforts to battle bulging waistlines. That has raised concern among some experts on eating disorders because they fear the grant-making programs could spark an increase in the number of children who develop eating disorders and lose an unhealthy amount of weight out of a misguided quest to be slim.

“We don’t want people to be so concerned about childhood obesity that kids go in the opposite direction,” says Lynn Grefe, chief executive officer of the National Eating Disorders Association, in Seattle. “The last thing we need to hear is parents attacking their children or bringing up the subject of food because the child is overeating and suddenly the child ends up purging or having unhealthy practices.”

Recognizing the sensitivity of the topic, some grant makers avoid using the term obesity. “We are focused on obesity, but we don’t come right out there and say it,” says Debbie L. Watson, vice president of the Winter Park Health Foundation, in Florida. “The tactics we are employing will prevent or address the issue of obesity, but you aren’t going to find the word obesity in our stuff.”

Among its recent grants, the Winter Park Health Foundation is spending $4.2-million over three years to pay for nurses and mental-health counselors in 13 Orange County schools who will help identify and treat health problems early, including problems related to being overweight. In addition, the foundation supports activities that keep fitness and nutrition in the front of students’ minds. For example, on “Wellness Wednesdays,” students receive water bottles, bananas, or other items to remind them of healthy food choices. The foundation hopes to reduce the percentage of youngsters who are overweight in those schools, now about 11 percent, to 5 percent.

Sources of Support

The Winter Park Health Foundation is just one of the many so-called health-conversion foundations, which were formed when nonprofit hospitals or other health-care providers converted to for-profit status, that are helping youngsters avoid big weight gains. And corporations, especially those in industries with a natural link to that goal, such as food, insurance, and sporting-goods companies, have also dedicated dollars. For example, Nike Inc., in Beaverton, Ore., donated $1.6-million in cash and equipment last year to 32 affiliates of Boys & Girls Clubs of America to promote physical activity among youngsters ages 8 to 15. Programs include swim lessons in Atlanta and a hiking club in Hawaii.

In California and Georgia, grant makers have formed new coalitions to explore how best to persuade people to increase physical activity and eat healthier foods, to prevent excessive weight gains. Five California foundations, spearheaded by the Health Trust, in San Jose, have contributed $50,000 each to develop a program to improve the health of Santa Clara County residents, with weight control the top priority. The Georgia coalition, led by the Healthcare Georgia Foundation, in Atlanta, is just now beginning to make plans.

Government money is also becoming available to charities that fight obesity. The Health and Wellness Trust Fund Commission, in Raleigh, N.C., will spend $9-million — provided from the state’s settlement with tobacco companies — over the next three years on programs that help fight obesity among children and families.

In addition, the federal government may provide big financial incentives to charities that promote healthy eating and physical activity: A bill pending in Congress would authorize $60-million to be given next year to “community organizations” that try to combat obesity and eating disorders, particularly among children and adolescents.

Dearth of Groups

Many grant makers hope an influx of money for weight-control programs will stimulate new nonprofit efforts, and even the creation of new organizations.

The Healthy Communities Foundation of Lucas County Hospitals and Health Systems, in Toledo, Ohio, found a shortage of takers when it offered $55,000 in grants to fight childhood obesity last year.

“We expected more responses and expected more proven programs,” says Jan L. Ruma, a vice president of the Hospital Council of Northwest Ohio, who runs the foundation. The foundation chose to distribute just $34,000 of the money and is currently deciding whether to award another round of grants next year.

The lack of national programs focused on obesity has prompted the creation of at least one new group. Action for Healthy Kids was founded in Washington in January and now coordinates 51 volunteer groups in every state and the District of Columbia to work to improve nutrition and physical-fitness opportunities in schools. The group, which has only one full-time employee so far, has already received several big grants, including $3-million from the National Dairy Council to be used over the next three years and a $2-million commitment announced last month from the National Football League, to be used over the next four years.

Other nonprofit organizations have also decided to focus on school programs since young people spend the majority of each weekday there. The Sunflower Foundation: Health Care for Kansans, in Topeka, for example, has given $46,000 to Manhattan High School to buy exercise equipment and renovate a room that can be used for a physical-education class for students who feel uncomfortable in regular gym class. The program started after a nurse at the school noticed a rise in the number of students requesting elevator passes because they felt tired upon reaching the top of the stairs at the four-story school.

Making Choices

Some foundations have pushed to get healthier food choices before students while they attend school.

The California Endowment, in Woodland Hills, has given $1.3-million in the past three years to the California Center for Public Health Advocacy, in Davis, to try to eliminate sodas and other sugary carbonated beverages from school vending machines, primarily in Los Angeles County. The grant has paid off: In August, the school board there voted to ban soda sales from vending machines during the school day, starting in January.

In Santa Ana, Calif., Latino Health Access has received money from the HealthCare Foundation for Orange County to recruit parents to visit local elementary schools at lunch time and show them how to peel or cut fruit to make it easier and more appealing for students to eat.

Some nonprofit officials, however, have decided to concentrate instead on what students eat after school is out.

Last summer, the Oklahoma City Indian Clinic took 50 children ages 8 to 11 to learn how to choose baked or smaller food options than they would have selected previously at places like McDonald’s and Pizza Hut. As part of the program, paid for with a $7,500 grant from the Aetna Foundation, in Hartford, Conn., children played in a park for an hour after lunch.

“It doesn’t do me any good to preach vegetables if that is not what their family is doing,” says Cathy Waller, a registered dietitian at the clinic.

Her goal, she says, has been to teach children just how many calories items such as large cups of soft drinks contain and to get them “to realize that those calories will make them fat.”

Adds Ms. Waller: “I tell children there is no such thing as bad food, it’s just how much.”

She plans to run the 10-week program for parents, and also repeat the children’s version next summer, this time including younger kids, beginning at age 7, because she has found that the younger children tend to be the most receptive.

Helping the Poor

Officials from antipoverty hunger groups say they need to do a better job of persuading grant makers — and the general public — that they have an important role to play in promoting healthy eating.

“A lot of foundations make low-income kids a priority, but there is only a superficial understanding among them that obesity can actually be linked to a lack of food in the home,” says James D. Weill, president of the Food Research and Action Center, an anti-hunger group in Washington.

Even though no studies directly link poverty with higher rates of obesity, Mr. Weill says that people in low-income households often choose high-calorie foods, such as pasta, because they are cheaper than lower-calorie foods, such as many fruits and vegetables.

Other hunger groups have had more success in attracting grant money to their healthy eating programs.

The Children’s Hunger Alliance, in Columbus, Ohio, received $25,000 from the Columbus Foundation earlier this year to provide nutrition and food information to about 100 new immigrants in Franklin County who care for young children in their homes. The alliance gave the day-care providers children’s books — in English or in the native languages of the providers — that talk about different foods, such as If You Give a Moose a Muffin. The charity also offers ideas about low-cost activities that day-care providers can organize for children, such as washing the car or taking a bike ride, that help burn calories.

“What we are trying to do is build good habits in the home at an early age,” says Dianne Radigan, the group’s chief operating officer. “And to try and get the kids to know what a strawberry, salad, and broccoli are.” The alliance has also received a $150,000 grant from the Bank One Foundation, in Chicago, to expand the program statewide this fall.

In addition to educating parents and day-care providers, some foundations are setting their sights on doctors and dentists, believing they have a key role to play in identifying and treating obesity.

The Assisi Foundation of Memphis recently awarded Bettina M. Beech, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Memphis, $250,000 to interview groups of parents about what questions they have for health-care workers about nutrition and fitness for their children. Ms. Beech plans to develop two guides, with help from a communications agency — one for families and the other for medical providers — that suggest ways to talk to youngsters about eating and exercise.

Ms. Beech also wants to set up an online training program for physicians on how to communicate with young patients about their weight without offending the child or parent.

“We would like to see more physicians counseling with families, not just on the treatment side but on the prevention side,” she says. “A lot of people are not even aware of how serious the issue of pediatric obesity is.”

However, grant makers are starting to pay close attention as many prepare to invest thousands of dollars to keep waistlines in check. The country’s obesity problem “is going to be with us a long time,” says Billie G. Hall, president of the Sunflower Foundation, which has distributed $1.5-million in mostly childhood-obesity grants since 2000. “It’s a major public-health problem, rivaling tobacco. It’s going to take generations to get a hold of it.”

Michael Anft contributed to this article.