We know that kids of color have worse outcomes in school in America. And kids in low-income areas. And kids who don’t speak English as their first language.
What about kids with childhood obesity?
Kavitha Cardoza, a journalist for the Hechinger Report, is one of the few people who has looked into this growing population and says their education outcomes are way worse than every other group. It’s a problem that affects 15 million children and the pandemic only made it worse.
Cardoza has been writing about childhood obesity for years and joined The Show to talk about it.
Full conversation
KAVITHA CARDOZA: They're more likely to get lower grades in reading and math, to repeat a grade, they're twice as likely to be placed in special ed or remedial classes. They're also significantly more likely to miss school, to be suspended, received attention, and they're less likely to enter and to graduate from college.
LAUREN GILGER: Wow, OK, so really big differences here. And you also found in your reporting that they're often treated differently in schools. Tell us, you know, what often happens?
CARDOZA: I think it's very unconscious on the part of teachers, at least I like hope so, but I think we all have this kind of unconscious bias against people with obesity. And the kind of thinking is, if you don't want to be treated like this, you should lose weight as if it's something under our control, and it really isn't.
It's such a complex disease and it's made up of genetics and hormones and economics and the environment and so many different factors and so children really have a hard time. They're treated differently both by their peers and by teachers. I profiled so many children with obesity, and they have no idea what the research said, Lauren. It mirrored exactly what the research said over and over.
GILGER: Over and over. Wow. So tell us, yeah, tell us about some of those students you profile, for example, a student in the piece named Stephanie, whose last name you're withholding to protect her privacy. Tell us about what happened to her in school.
CARDOZA: She is Hispanic and so in her family, she says no one ever said anything. She was called, like always thought of as very cute. Her parents doted on her and she went to school as early as kindergarten, she started being called a Teletubby.
And then after that, she noticed like when someone brought in cupcakes for their birthday, the teacher would say, “well, are you sure you want a slice of that? Like, why don't you eat the carrots instead?”
So it was one of those things where she didn't want to eat in school, she didn't want to be around other kids, and I think what particularly hurt her is she said that she was taught and told from a very young age, “if you ever need help, if you're ever upset, go find a teacher, they'll be on your side.” But in this case she found that that wasn't true.
She kept telling me through the interview how she felt like a shadow, and she said she would put her hand up to answer questions, and the teacher wouldn't call her even though she was the only one with her hand up or she wasn't chosen for things. This came up several times with Stephanie and other kids, you know, they were not chosen for the drama. They were not chosen to be in the robotics club, they were not chosen. It was as if teachers didn't see them or thought that they were not capable.
And one time was just devastating to her. She went up to the front of the classroom to ask the teacher a question after class, and the teacher said, “Hey, are you a new student?”
And she said, “I've been here the whole year. I've been submitting classwork like every day. Like how can you not have seen me?”
And she said that was the point at which I think she was in the seventh grade. She said she'd stopped caring about grades.
GILGER: Wow, so that, yeah, I mean you can see the direct impact on her to her educational outcomes. And it's not just kids teasing, which you might expect. It's, it's the way teachers and staff treat kids like this, too. Is there any training, Kavitha, for, for teachers, for school staff about this?
CARDOZA: It's really disappointing, Lauren, but there isn't. Every school district, every school really has an anti-bullying policy. And you know that's explicitly mentioned and teachers receive training on, you can't discriminate on the basis of race or gender or sexual orientation or national origin, or, you know, we have a lot of protections and teachers are trained on a lot of those things.
They are not trained on weight and in some ways that kind of mirrors our society where there are legal protections for all those other identities, but not for weight. You can legally discriminate on the basis of weight. And so there's no training, there's no protections for kids like that.
GILGER: Is there in your reporting on this, is there talk of solutions?
CARDOZA: We're not sure how effective it is, but one study found that it was effective, and that was to include weight. You know, you have teacher training for all these other kind of categories, include weight, and some school districts do have appearance, but researchers found that is not enough. And then everyone is more likely to kind of get on board and even realize that they're doing it.
A lot of times it's unconscious with teachers because you know our society is so we have this unconscious bias about weight and we're only starting to change that.
GILGER: Right. Like that's that solution is almost so simple you don't think of it. Let's talk then about the, the context that this is happening in, right? Like we are much more aware of, at least it seems, of childhood obesity, of obesity in general as an issue. There's much more conversation around it today and what it means and discrimination against it. Has behavior gotten any better on a broader scale? Why hasn't that been reflected in what's happening to kids?
CARDOZA: Actually, I, I have to say that with kids, childhood obesity has steadily been increasing over the past 50 years, and so has weight bias. It's one of those things where you've seen other biases like racial bias and things like that go down, but you have not seen discrimination on the basis of weight go down. And I think now because of drugs like Ozempic, there's even more of a sense almost that, well you could just take a tablet or you could just take a shot and you could cure this, and it's kind of really not understanding what the situation is.
There are all kinds of factors that one, these drugs are not approved for children and teens. Bariatric surgery, which the child I interviewed Stephanie had when she was 18. But you have to take nutritional supplements all your life, you know, so if you're kind of low income, if you're not in a stable household, like those are not avenues you can go down if you don't have insurance, and it's a major surgery.
So I'm not saying like those are not solutions. I've spoken to several doctors who really advocate for it, the Association of Pediatrics came out and said like children should be given the option of surgery when they're teenagers, but it really is something to carefully consider.
But really the eat less and exercise more. I mean, if it worked, then adults would do it easily, right? And we know how hard it is. Why do we think it's easier for children, especially when they're not the ones cooking food, grocery shopping, you know, deciding what's on the school lunch menu, they have no control over any of that.
Right. And, and does some of this point to a larger problem, like a societal problem, just in terms of access to good foods?
CARDOZA: Absolutely it's a much, much bigger problem. I was at a grocery store once and I was speaking to a mother and she had a lot of shelf stable, what they call shelf stable foods. And she said she was in a low income neighborhood. She said, “I can't afford to buy food that my children won't eat.”
Lauren, that just stopped me in my tracks because, you know, if you're upper middle class, it's very easy to say, “oh, try different foods.” You can't do that if you don't have money or you don't have that disposable income, and so it's way more complex.
Charleen Badman's Blue Watermelon Project brings fresh food to schools, with a side of being seen
When it comes to childhood obesity, there's one trailblazer here in Arizona trying to change the conversation around it: Charleen Badman, the James Beard Award-winning chef behind FnB in Scottsdale.
Since 2016, she's been going to schools teaching kids about food. It's called the Blue Watermelon Project.
The Show joined Badman at Echo Canyon School, where a group of students was making amaranth pancakes with all the toppings on a recent Monday afternoon.
“We're a group of chefs, volunteers, farmers, advocates, educators, principals, and teachers, you know, it's taste education,” Badman said.
The kids are mixing, chopping, whipping their reward after harvesting the key ingredient they grew themselves right there on school grounds.
“They were able to see their amaranth grow. They planted it in September. We harvested some today. They're now having pancakes. They're gonna be able to taste what they planted,”
But do they like their healthier than your average pancakes and whipped cream?
“Is it good, you guys?” The Show host Lauren Gilger asks the students.
“The only thing I don't like is that the whipped cream kind of tastes a little like water,” a student answered.
“There's no sugar in it, probably, huh?” Gilger said.
“You happy? OK,” Badman said. “I can see you liked yours. All right, good, good.”
CHARLEEN BADMAN: But liking the food is not the point, as Badman told me when she came into our studios to talk more about it. I started originally when we first opened the restaurant going to one school. It was Arcadia Neighborhood Learning Center, and they had asked me to come and do a chef in the garden, and they had this beautiful garden.
They wanted to use the produce, they wanted to have the students be able to see it being used and that the opportunity of having a chef come in would be really great for the students. But, after doing that first one, I was, I just loved it.
I wanted to come back. And so I kept going back. And when I say it started in 2016, by then it's when I really saw that I wanted to take this opportunity I had with one school and do it in multiple schools.
Lauren Gilger/KJZZ The Blue Watermelon project at Echo Canyon School.
LAUREN GILGER: And it's gotten much bigger since then, right?
BADMAN: It is, this year we're in 35 schools next year, 50 schools.
GILGER: Wow. And you work with chefs all over the state as well.
BADMAN: We do, and it's so many chefs that have been able to. They've just stepped up and, and have become part of what we're trying to do, the movement of, of getting an opportunity for students to try fresh food and, and also to know where it comes from.
GILGER: Yeah, OK, so let's talk a little bit about why this resonated with you so much when you went to that first school to do the first version of this, right? I mean, are you like a kid person? Was this about the kids for you? Was that surprising to you that you enjoyed it so much?
BADMAN: It was surprising I enjoyed it so much because I had told the vice principal who invited me, you know, I don't like children, and, but I'm going to do this. And then I saw, I felt how great it felt. I saw the difference I was making like immediately and the opportunity and the joy it brought the students and I was just so excited to go back.
I mean, I'm passionate about food, I'm passionate about cooking. And then to have this opportunity to share it with younger people is just, I think it's great.
GILGER: So when, what kind of reactions have you gotten from kids? Like, do they, how, how foreign is the idea of growing a garden and harvesting it and cooking with that food to these kids?
BADMAN: All sorts of reactions. I've recently had a 6-year-old say, “I don't eat plants,” and she wasn't going to participate. They will tell you they, they're not going to eat things, they're not going to eat what you brought. And then there's, there are others that are excited about it.
And we don't, we don't ever tell them they're going to have to eat this or you, or you know, you got to take that try it bite. Obviously I want them to try it, but if they don't want to, it's OK. And often they see how excited their friends are about it and they're like, “OK, I'll try it.”
Lauren Gilger/KJZZ Charleen Badman is chef and co-owner of Scottsdale’s Fnb.
GILGER: Yeah. What are your memories of food when you were a kid? Like, were you exposed to fresh foods as a young kid?
BADMAN: Not a whole lot. It just wasn't something we had. When I went to visit my grandparents that lived in California, we had a lot. They had a garden. My grandmother had come from a farm. She always made sure she had a garden.
They had a macadamia nut tree, they had avocado tree. They had all these beautiful things in the backyard. I can tell you that I definitely didn't appreciate them. I was definitely the child that was saying, “I don't want to eat these things.” And I just wish, I look back at that memory and wish I would have been more appreciative of, of what they were trying to offer because, you know, they had really some of the best food.
GILGER: So you grew to be not just a chef, but a chef who's really famous for the way you work with vegetables in particular. How did, how did that transformation happen for you?
BADMAN: It, it happened while having FnB in the last 15 years. It happened, with the fact that I changed my eating habits and I changed what I like to eat. I think that successful chefs, they, they cook what they enjoy. And I enjoy eating vegetables and I enjoy coming up with different ways to flavor them and different ways to prepare them. And, and I think that that was my own kind of personal journey of, of changing the way I ate and then putting that into how I cook today.
GILGER: Yeah. Is this for you about nutrition for kids? Is it about making kids healthier? Is it about the food and just exposing them to it?
BADMAN: I think it's all of those things. I think that, you know, it is about having better eating habits. It definitely is about maybe trying something that they've never had before, being excited about fruits and vegetables, being excited about food. And then I think it translates into maybe them, with that exposure that we're able to give them, maybe having them open up to trying more things like say in the cafeteria.
GILGER: So what do you make of the conversation around childhood obesity right now, which sort of dovetails with what you're doing? I mean, the rates are sort of an epidemic in our country, but we also know that those kids face discrimination in their own right.
BADMAN: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think another part of why Blue Watermelon started, why I feel like I want to take this opportunity to work with kids is, is because of my own personal journey. I mean, I was, overweight by the time I was 10, and it's a struggle, it's a struggle to eat well and, I think that if you are given the opportunity to have better food choices and be exposed to better food choices, then that'll continue as you, you know, grow older.
And then, you know, I think, I think about, again, going back to my grandmother and all that exposure of like, you know, the, it was there, but I was like I would literally trade that avocado sandwich to get something like in the school lunch that was, you know, bad for me, you know, get the bologna sandwich or whatever.
GILGER: So those, I mean those experiences like shape you though it sounds like?
BADMAN: Oh, it does.
GILGER: Do you see yourself in a lot of those kids that you work with in this project?
BADMAN: Oh, absolutely. I see, I see the kids that get bullied. I see the kids that are bullies. I see the kids that, you know, or the fear of eating, maybe even the fear of eating around other people, I can see all of that.
I mean, it's interesting that another chef that was working with me said, you know, I, she was talking to a group of people and she said, “I saw Charleen go to the kid that was by themselves and sit down with them, you know, that's how she is,” and it's like that's how I was in like in high school.
I mean, I remember, I wanted to be around the students that were the ones getting picked on and we're the ones that maybe had a disability or something like that. Definitely not the cool kids. I just, those were my friends, you know, I feel those kids when I, when we work with them and, and, what, you know, try to spend a little extra time with them and make sure they know that they're seen.
That's part of what we do with our food, too, is like we have different chefs every month coming up with a dish and we want to make sure that, that the students with our recipes, can feel like maybe something that they're having at home is being seen in the classroom and that they can be proud of where they're from and their heritage and things like that.
And that they can, they can feel seen. It's really important, I think as a child that you, that you feel that way. The food has all of those ways of touching somebody.
