SHR

Obesity, screen time, and sedentariness predict lower academic achievement in children Antonio Garcia-Hermoso and Raquel Marina recently recruited 395 seventh-grade boys and girls from seven schools to estimate the relationship between weight, physical activity, screen time, and academic achievement. After adjusting for several confounding variables, they found that boys and girls with obesity had worse grades than their leaner peers and that kids who had more than 2-hours of screen time daily had worse grades independent of weight status and physical activity. These associations only became stronger when variables were combined. Both boys and girls who were obese, with low–medium physical activity and exceeded recommended screen time were less likely to earn high academic achievements than their counterparts who were non-obese, with high physical activity and met screen time recommendations, independent of potential confounders. Have you ever wondered what infants in the U.S. eat? To say good nutrition during infancy is...

Ryan Walker from the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and Michael Goran from the University of Southern California sought to determine actual sugar content and composition in commonly used infant formulas, baby foods, and other grocery items frequently marketed towards children. After looking through the online shopping databases for three of the U.S.’s largest grocery retailers – Walmart, SuperValu, and Safeway – they selected every tenth product from infant formulas, baby food, yogurt, breakfast cereal, and packaged baked goods and purchased all products from the retailers in a defined zip-code region in Los Angeles to help control for location and inventory. Twenty products per category were chosen for analysis. The results were not pretty The average percent of total calories supplied by sugar in infant formulas was 27.4%, with five having greater than 40%. Since most formula attempts to mimic breast milk, it was no surprise that most were...