A startling finding has emerged concerning the nutritional status of Australian school children. We know they are getting fatter than ever but a new finding has nutritionists worried. Aussie kids from the suburbs are growing out and not up. The finding is controversial. Some scientists say – maybe it’s their genes. But one researcher warns that these kids are malnourished. And her fear is that stunted growth means stunted brain development. Are we raising a generation of kids who are fat, short and falling behind at school?
On the outskirts of Sydney, a school principal began noticing a worrying development in his students.
For a number of years he’d seen his school’s performance falling behind.
About three years ago we had a lot of trouble with children and their concentration.
Was he seeing a small part of a problem affecting children across Australia that went beyond obesity?
Jenny Odea: you assume that the obese child is overfed, the fact is that obesity may be a form of malnutrition.
It’s got experts worried that some overweight children are facing a development crisis.
Jenny Odea: It’s very serious, it suggests growth stunting, which suggests nutritional deprivation.
Scientists are asking could our children be failing to reach their real potential all because of what they eat?
This story could be told from just about any school in Australia.
When principal Michael Young saw behavioural problems in the kids in his school he had a hunch that food was the problem.
So he ran an experiment. He introduced milk to the kids diet, and in a radical move he turned his school into a sugar and preservative free zone.
We decided that we'd like to try removing the preservatives and the red cordials and the green cordials and the fizzy soft drinks off the menu in the school, just to see if it made a difference.
The result was astounding. Within six weeks he began to notice a change.
There was a 40 to 60% drop in certain types of behaviour that children were exhibiting in the classroom, and an increase of 30 to 40% in the length of time they could concentrate on a task.
Getting rid of sugar seemed to be improving the children’s ability to study.
But he wanted to find out what was going on with the rest of their diet. Was what they were eating before they came to school part of the problem?
We surveyed the children themselves and found that 25% of children were not having breakfast and another 25% were having a breakfast that was not balanced nutritionally and did not help them concentrate at school
Uknown to Michael, Nutritionist, Jenny O’Dea was travelling from one end of the country to the other to document what thousands of our kids are eating.
What she found came as a shock.
I did an in-depth thorough analysis of their breakfast as a proxy for the rest of the day. So as a nutritional snapshot breakfast gives you a good insight into what the child might be having for the 24 hour period. And some of the breakfasts were appalling. And other foods were chips, soft drinks, tea, coffee, non-nutritious fluids were really quite high in the diets of these children.
It was no surprise that one in five of the children was obese.
But when she weighed them and measured their height, Jenny found something she wasn’t expecting. It was another development problem.
Some of the overweight kids were also shorter than the other children by about 2 centimetres. Particularly the low income children. Now this was a very surprising finding and a very concerning finding.
What was causing these overweight children to have stunted growth?
It sounds like a contradiction, but Jenny thinks the problem is that they’re getting too many empty calories. And it appears to be a particular problem in areas where incomes are low.
There was something going on like an accidental malnutrition where the child was eating excess calories to induce overweight or obesity. But not the right kind of food to promote growth, and hence the 2 centimetre height deficit.
It seems as though excess calories were taking the place of nutrients.
Despite all the food they were eating, the children were missing out on the vitamins and minerals in meat, milk, fruit and vegetables.
Some children hadn’t had any fruits or vegetables in the three days prior to the study. One tenth of children hadn’t had any milk at all or dairy products in the three days before the study. So their variety of food was very, very poor.
Could this nutritional deficiency explain another problem area in the class room.
The hypothesis is that if their bone growth has been stunted by 2 centimetres, which is what we think we have found, then other parts of the body may not have received adequate nutrition for growth, particularly the brain. So there's a suggestion that perhaps the brain is not functioning as it should, and perhaps it's not growing, as it should.
Geoff Cleghorn is a professor of pediatrics. He’s seen what happens to the developing brain when just one essential nutrient - iron - is too low.
In the very young you may have problems with psycho motor development, particularly with learning and cognition and problems potentially with speech and with balance. In the older children it may, probably manifest itself more in learning and sort of paying attention in school and academic performance.
In fact, Geoff says that if you don’t get enough iron at the right time, it can cause a drop in IQ of 5 to 10 points.
We’ll have to wait for further studies to find out if learning ability is really being impaired.
But Michael Young doesn’t want to wait – he knows his kids aren’t eating enough different foods.
We actually had children pointing at things like plums and saying ‘What is that?’ ‘What’s it called?’ So, obviously these children were not being exposed to not so much exotic fruits but maybe seasonal fruits. So the knowledge is not complete out there on what foods are available.
Now his school has a breakfast club – one of dozens springing up around the country. Before they start their first class, his students eat a proper meal.
These programs are very beneficial. I think without them there’s a lot of children out there who won’t develop to their full potential. We can’t delay, no. We can’t have any delay in addressing the welfare of children and particularly the needs that they have in relation to their food.
Perhaps the obesity epidemic has made us focus too much on weight gain when we think of food. This research is showing us that nutrition is even more important and may dramatically affect learning.
Yes, I think we have taken our eye off the ball. In the last few years we’ve talked about fat and obesity. The bottom line is that a child will always need good balanced nutrition and that’s where you begin and you begin young.
- Reporter: Karina Kelly
- Producer: Steven Salgo
- Researcher: Leonie Hansell
Rosemeadow Public School
University of Sydney