Chicken with potatoes, carrot-and-cabbage salad: It looks like a detox meal, but it is the menu at a school cafeteria in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, which is seeking new ways to fight childhood obesity.
Nearly one-third of children in Brazil are obese, an epidemic city health officials and community leaders are seeking to address in innovative ways, enlisting school cafeterias and taking their message of healthful eating to the street.
“Cake? There’s no cake here,” cook Neide Oliveira laughed as she chopped onions for the 650 students of Burle Marx public school in the Curicica neighborhood on Rio’s west side.
Photo: AFP
Additive-packed snacks and cookies are also out, after city officials banned ultraprocessed foods from schools this year.
Instead, students are discovering classic Brazilian fruits and vegetables that are often overlooked these days, such as yams, okra and persimmons — which many children initially mistook for tomatoes.
Judging from how students devour their lunch, the program is having an impact.
Photo: AFP
“I like everything they make here, and it’s good for my health. At home I eat a lot of junk food, like pizza and hamburgers,” 15-year-old Guilherme said.
“Childhood obesity is an epidemic, not just in Brazil, but worldwide,” Rio city government nutritionist Marluce Fortunato said.
The city is responding with a program at public and private schools, asking teachers to educate students on healthful eating habits.
Thirty-one percent of Brazilian children and teens are overweight or obese. A recent study by the Desiderata institute found more than 80 percent of five to 19-year-olds reported eating at least one ultraprocessed food the previous day, such as sausages, soda and pastries.
“Science has shown these products are very detrimental to our health and are responsible for 70 percent of chronic diseases worldwide,” pediatrician Daniel Becker said.
In children, they can lead to a double-barreled problem: obesity combined with malnutrition, which can damage learning ability and attention span, he said.
However, changing eating habits is a challenge.
Ultraprocessed foods are made with ingredients designed to “addict the tastebuds,” and have a market advantage over natural products, given their mass distribution and cheaper prices, Becker said.
Sitting next to Guilherme, his friend Lucas, 14, is feasting on his chicken, rice and beans. However, he admits that after school he regularly buys chips outside.
Fortunato said schools need parents’ help.
“It’s easier to educate young children. Once a person’s way of thinking is set, it’s a challenge to introduce new concepts,” she said.
She mentioned the example of a father who complained to the school because his son started asking for natural juices at home, which are more expensive than their sugary, additive-heavy counterparts.
Still, some adults manage to change. At age 60, grandmother Vera Lucia Perreira discovered organic vegetables — and fell in love.
“They’re not just healthful, they’re tasty,” she said.
“My seven-year-old granddaughter already eats better” than previous generations, she said.
Perreira is one of 160 women involved in a project called Organic Favela, launched 13 years ago to transform eating habits in the poor Babilonia neighborhood.
The project runs workshops for residents, and also uses creative approaches, such as healthful recipes painted in graffiti on neighborhood streets.
Founder Regina Tchelly also works with schools. Her mission: get children to have five colors of natural foods on their plates.
“We teach people to make avocado butter” and “Barbie eggs” — dyed red with beets, she said.
The 42-year-old entrepreneur is the author of a cookbook that won Brazil’s top literary prize last year, the Jabuti, in the creative economy category.
At the national level, a high-visibility ad campaign launched last month seeks to raise awareness of the health risks of ultraprocessed foods, enlisting celebrities and experts to spread the word.
The campaign, called “sweet poison” (doce veneno, in Portuguese), wants the government to tax ultraprocessed foods and use the proceeds to subsidize healthful ones.
“It’s hard to change, but that doesn’t mean people have to be prisoners of their ideas,” Perreira said.
“We have to open their minds to look differently at food, for the sake of our future,” she said.
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