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Speaker 1 (00:04):
Welcome to the Daily Dive Weekend edition. I'm Oscar Ramirez,
and every week I explore the top stories making waves
in the news and some that are just playing interesting.
I'll connect you with the journalists and the people who
know the story and bring you news without the noise
so you can make an informed decision. You can catch
a new episode of The Daily Dive every Monday through Friday,
and it's ready when you wake up. On the weekend edition,
(00:27):
I'll be bringing you some of the best stories from
the week. On the coronavirus front, there's a lot of
concern about these variants that are floating around, especially as
we're making a hard push to get as many people
vaccinated as we can. One of the big questions with
all of this is why are these different strains emerging now.
One answer to this is time. The virus has always
(00:47):
been mutating since the beginning, and these variants can be
a response to increasing herd immunity, response to treatments, and
just evolutionary changes due to the time it has been circulating.
For more on these COVID variants, will speak to Brian Resnick,
Senior Science reporter. For as long as this pandemic has
been going on. The virus has been changing it every
time it gets into a human body, it makes copies
(01:09):
of itself. And every time it makes a copy, it
can make a copy air and that's like the source
of mutation. That's the source of like how things change,
and so you know it, it does seem a little
peculiar that throughout the pandemic there have been like different variants,
There have been different changes in the virus, but they
haven't stood out to scientists until now. They haven't been
(01:33):
associated with the concerning things. So the things about these
variants that are concerning is in the case of that
B one one seven, which is the UK variant or
sometimes called that UM, that one seems to be more
transmissible those other ones you mentioned. You know, there's some
worries about maybe they're these variants are getting a little
bit better at evading our our immune systems UM. But
(01:58):
you know, to answer the question, shouldn't have why now, Well,
one big answer to that is just like there's been
a lot of time. You know, we can think about
this in a few ways, like one like the as
the virus UH spreads between person to person, it can
it can accumulate more changes through you know, that natural
(02:21):
mutation process, and you know, if you're looking at a
virus that has spread to ninety plus million confirmed cases
around the globe, that's a lot of chances to change. Uh.
You know, that doesn't explain to all of it, but
it does explain some of it that you know, you
would expect the diversity, the genetic diversity of the virus
(02:42):
at different forms that could possibly take to increase over time.
And one of those things kind of adding on too
that a lot of this has to do with time
and the amount of times that the virus has been replicating,
but also partial human immunity. Right, a lot of people
have gotten it. We have the vaccines rolling out now,
so that's starting to build up also, so you kind
of pressure the virus to make its own changes to
(03:05):
keep on living basically, And that's kind of one of
the things that they suspect with the Brazil variant. It
might have changed just enough where you could be more
susceptible to getting COVID nineteen if you've already had it,
just because of the way it's changed. What we're describing
here is evolution, and evolution has two components, and one
is change. One is variation, and so that was I
(03:27):
was just describing, you know, throughout the pandemic, the viruses
and a lot of opportunities to change. But that doesn't
explain necessarily why we see some variants more than others.
And for that, you know, that's the other half of evolution,
which is selection or natural selection, which is that you know,
now we're operating in an environment where maybe some of
(03:50):
these variants have a little bit of an advantage. So
I think in particular, this is what the concern is
in Brazil where there have been area is in Brazil
that where that there had horrible outbreaks, huge proportions of
the population were infected, and now there seems to be
this new variant that seems to still be infecting people.
(04:12):
And the idea there is that there's possibly a lot
of of immunity there and that immunity is acting as
a selection pressure. So if you're a viral variant that's
a little bit better at evading you know, the immune
response that has been generated so far, then maybe you
start to gain a little foothold, you start to outcompete
(04:34):
the other variants, and then suddenly you know you have
a huge portion or huge population of people carrying a
variant that looks a little different than the variants that
were circulating the last year. One of the other interesting
parts of this, and as we can mention it, you know,
a lot of this just happens over time and with
(04:54):
the virus mutating every single time. But there's some theories
as to why these variants might have gotten stronger, and
one of them has to do that it might have
emerged in an immunocompromised person, so it had some time
to maybe learn how to get around the immune system
in one of these people. And the other one has
to do with maybe using convalescent plasma. We're using those
(05:15):
treatments as part of putting anybodies into people, but also
one of these things where you know, it's sensing these anybodies,
so it's learning how to get around those things. When
I talked to scientists about this, the way they put
it to me is like rare things can start to
happen when the pandemic has raged on for such a
long time. So you know, you mentioned immuno compromised person,
(05:38):
and so there are some people that when they get infected,
like their immune systems aren't as strong as others and
they can put up a little bit of a fight,
but not the complete fight. And what that leads to
and that person is that they end up living with
the virus for a really long time. So in the
normal course of an illness, someone get sick and effective
(06:01):
as the virus, and then their system clears them of
that virus, you know, hopefully within a matter of like
a week or two. But some people can have that
virus kind of fighting in their immune system, fighting with
their immune system for like weeks and weeks and months
and months. And so when I said, like a rare
thing can happen, like, you know, throughout the pandemic, you know,
(06:22):
we've been trying to protect vulnerable people and hopefully immuno
compromise people have been mostly um staying safe. But you know,
a virus can get into him, you know, compromised person.
It can. The longer it is in that fight with
antibodies that are kind of hurting it, but you know,
not completely eliminating it, the more chances it has to
(06:45):
mutate and change within any individual body, the more chances
it has to learn how to completely swart or more
or not completely, but swart a little bit more of
that immune response. So like an immunoc compromise person is
kind of like a little bit of of a of
a stage for evolution to happen, because a person can
(07:08):
be infective was such a long time again, that's like
really rare, Like a lot of things have to happen
that person. That person would also have to pass it
on to somebody else, you know, after it's been kind
of working in there. I have a friend who had
a kidney transplant and he's basically been on lockdown for
about a year for fear of contracting COVID nineteen at
Also luckily he hasn't, but you know, that's always been
(07:31):
a worry, and then you know, how do you treat
it if he does come down with it. So a
lot of this has to do these variants. We find
out about them by doing this uh genetic sequencing of
the virus, And with coronavirus specifically, it hadn't really been
done that much. I know with the flu they've been
doing it for a long time. But that's why a
lot of experts are pushing for these things to be
(07:53):
looked into more and and constantly sequence these genomes so
that we know when something is popping up so we
can then attack it. We're seeing vaccine makers on the
other side, Maderna saying we need a booster shot, we
might tweak the vaccine. To deal with these variants as
they pop up, you kind of need two things. They're like, yes,
you need greater surveillance of the viral genetics. And the
(08:15):
US does lag on this compared to other countries that
are really good at it, like the UK. But you
need to match that data with what's happening in the
real world. Like I said, variants can pop up all
the time, and sometimes they're just meaningless. Sometimes, like you know,
a virus can have random genetic changes that don't really
make it any more dangerous. So what you really need
(08:38):
is like a really careful way to study this. So
if there is a new variant, you can ask a
question like, oh, is this new variant associated with a
larger and larger proportion of cases? You can ask a question, oh,
is this new variant associated with a more severe disease
course or reinfections? Is it more associated with infecting people
(08:59):
who at all already been infected with the virus and
and so, yeah, this surveillance is one part of it.
But it's also just in general, like we need really
good data, we need to understand how the pandemic is
progressing across the country. Yeah, and that's exactly what's going
on with these. You know, we understand the UK variant
a little bit more than we do the one from
(09:20):
South Africa and Brazil, and will constantly be hearing about
these as they start to possibly take hold. You know,
as I said, the South African variant has just been
detected in South Carolina, so we'll see how much that
one has a chance to spread. Brian Resnick, Senior science
reporter at Vox, thank you very much for joining us.
Of course, finally for this week. Childhood obesity is an
(09:45):
ongoing problem that has only been made worse by the pandemic.
The huge disruptions to the regular school year has impacted
the amount of movement school kids are engaging in, as
well was their diets, and it could have a lasting
effect on their health. Kids tend to gain weight over
summer when there is no school, and many the pandemic
has been similar to a ten months summer break. Furthermore,
some of the most nutritious meals many kids were eating.
(10:06):
We're in school settings For more on this, will speak
to Sam Block, staff writer at the Counter. You mentioned
the childhood obesity crisis was a problem before the pandemic.
According to the most recent data that the federal government
has a little over nine of school aged children are obese,
and there are some predictions that that will rise, the
(10:28):
extent to which is not known yet, But I spoke
with a researcher who studies summerweight game. He looks into
what happens when kids are out of school, and he
figured that if kids were out of school for five
months this year, the national obesity rate would rise by
another four percent. So that's just five months of typical
(10:51):
out of school activity, and that's related mostly to uh
poor diet because kids aren't getting the healthy, nutritious foods
that they normally during the school year, and also surprisingly
sedentary activity. I think a lot of people tend to
think of summer as a time when we're running around
at the beach or playing sports, but kids actually spend
more time in front of screens when they're out of school.
(11:15):
So between the inferior diet and the sedentary activity, the
summer has a lot of similarities to the pandemic. And
again this prediction that the obesity rate is going up
for it's just a prediction. No one really knows what's
going to happen. But that's just for five months out
of school. We've now been out of school for ten months,
and we have these extenuating circumstances like um rising, food
(11:36):
and security, and poverty. So pediatricians, public health experts, even
some dieticians I spoke to from my story are afraid
that this could get really bad. Some of them had
said it's kind of like a ten month long summer
in effect, just because of the way of the shutdowns
and how all the disruptions to normal school life have
gone for children. Start me off with some of the
pediatricians and dietitians you've talked to, and tell me about
(11:59):
what they're seeing in their patients. So I spoke to
pediatricians in the Bay Area. I spoke to one in
Portland's book to one in Minneapolis. Their stories were very similar.
They have patients who are coming in who are you know,
as young as say five, six seven years old, who
used to be in the twenty percentile for their body
(12:19):
mass index. So that's a way of gauging your relative
height and weight, and they went from the twenty five
percentile too in a matter of months to seventy five percentile.
Now being in the seventy five percentile isn't itself a problem,
But when you gain that much weight over such a
short period of time, that worries them. That's one pediatrician.
Another one told me they had patients who are going
into the eighty five percentile, where you're clinically overweight, into
(12:42):
the ninety percentile where you're clinically obese. Some we're telling
me they saw kids who are putting on ten or
twenty pounds since the pandemic started in March. I spoke
to one who said that she had a patient, an
eleven year old girl I believe, who put on forty
pounds during the pandemic. As kids are growing, they should
be gaining weight. But when you're gaining that much weight soly,
pedetricians worry that that that could have adverse health effects
(13:03):
and that they're not going to lose that weight as
they get older. We've been hearing about coverage about this
throughout the pandemic. The Quarantine fifteen, you know, people kind
of jokingly giving it that name, you know, but if
that's happening with normal adults, people who can take care
of themselves, etcetera, etcetera. It's also happening to our children,
and it's diet is part of that. And this is
kind of where a lot of school lunch programs really
(13:26):
come into focus and how important it is both on
you know, kids actually getting meals, but also the nutritional
part of it. I think this is what drew me
to this story, was just hearing from people who are
concerned not so much about quote unquote empty bellies, but
the quality of the food that kids were eating. In America,
Starvation usually isn't the consequence of poverty, it's obesity. And
(13:51):
part of the reason why people are so concerned about
kids missing school meals is that, for I think twenty
two in school children who live near the poverty line,
school lunch is actually some of the healthiest food that
they can get. Now, you and I we probably grew
up at a time when school lunch wasn't so healthy.
We're probably thinking about sloppy Joe's and you know, fatty yeah, exactly.
(14:16):
But but that's changed during the Obama administration and at
the time, you know, I think there were a lot
of jokes, a lot of thanks Michelle Obama about school
food that look pretty unappetising. But the fact is these
school lunch changes have impacted child health. For the better,
kids who eat school lunch have to eat a certain
amount of fruit every day, a range of vegetables from
(14:38):
leafy greens to lagumes. They have to eat breads, pastas,
and muffins and other grains that are made with at
least fifty whole grain flour, which is richer in dietary fibers,
so it helps the body um it helps keep down
body weight. School lunches also had to cut back on
saturated fats and conform to age specific limits on calories
and sodium. That's part of an effort to drive down
(14:59):
hypertension and TA managers. And again, all of these changes,
the evidence is suggesting that this has impacted child health.
To the better, kids who eat school meals every day
consume more fruits and vegetables, fewer fats and sugars, have
better diets, lower weight, lower rates of unhealthy weight gain,
And as an epidemiologist told me, it's not just that
school lunch is healthier than it used to be. It's
(15:20):
healthier than a bag lunch brought from home, and now
enter the pandemic remote learning. You know, how do you
even feed kids that are not going to school? And
on the other side of things, cafeteria workers and whatnot,
they're not actually cooking a lot of these mills anymore
because of the way these rules have changed. So now
they're doing a lot of prepackaged, processed foods, which could
be worse for these diets. And it's important to remember
(15:43):
that the cafeteria workers who have been putting together these
meals for kids who aren't even in classrooms a lot
of the time, they deserve a lot of credit and
they deserve a lot of praise for being on the
front lines to help these children. That said, there are
some very real changes to the way they're all to
put together these meals. You know, staffing is down. There
(16:04):
were a lot of rules initially that were about the
safety of even cooking in the first place. It was
thought that, you know, packaged meals wrapped in plastic, we're
going to be safer to transmit and safer to distribute.
And as a result of a lot of these federal
waivers that have just made it easier for cafeteria staff
to put bag lunches together to go on routes and
delivering meals. You don't have the hot, nutritious, scratch cooked
(16:28):
meals that kids normally have in the cafeteria. You don't
know the salad bars, which a few dieticians told me
made them really sad. You know that for years they
had spent time working on kids, kind of training and
convincing them to get into leafy greens and like guns
and vegetables they wouldn't normally like. By giving them the
option of going to salad bars, that's all gone. Now
you have a lot of frozen foods. You have a
(16:48):
lot of shelf stable foods, processed foods, frozen burritos, salty snacks, chips,
fruit juice, vegetable juice, things that aren't bad per se.
But if that's in place of the healthy, nutritious meal
that you used to eat, kids are missing out on
a lot of nutrients. This year and again, this change
was made to make it easier to feed kids. So
(17:10):
what are the challenges going forward? I mean, there's a
lot of long term consequences because of this um You know,
what are those consequences and what are health officials, what
are schools trying to do to remedy that. The long
term consequences I think you know the dietitians that I
spoke to who worked on revamping school meals after the
Obama reforms. One long term consequence might be that kids
(17:33):
are going to lose their taste for vegetables and they're
just going to sort of revert back to starchy potatoes
and salty snacks and and uncrustables and pop tarts. The
other is the more serious consequence of childhood obesity, because
sixty seven percent of kids who are obese at five
years old will be obese at fifty and oviese adolescents
(17:53):
will remain obese adults. And when you become an obvioue adult,
you have higher risk for conditions like diabetes and hypertension
in potentially fatal medical events like heart attacks and strokes.
So this all just kind of adds up, and we worry,
And when I say we, I mean the public health
experts and epidemiologists I talked to worry about the long
term health consequences of this. I guess generation of pandemic kids.
(18:16):
In terms of what we can do about that. Obesity
has so many causes there's no one silver bullet. Yes,
the changes to school meals, and yes, the fact that
kids are missing these school meals and eating other food
at home is contributing to it. It's not the only
thing that's contributing to it. But if we do want
to attack and work on the diet piece, I heard
over and over again that the main thing that schools
have to do is return to these Obama era standards
(18:38):
for nutrition and for what goes in meals. Your listeners
may know that at the very end of his administration,
Donald Trump was able to push through rules to roll
back I'm sorry, he pushed through rules that rolled back
restrictions on UM, on whole grains, and sodium and flavored milk.
(19:00):
People want those all to return. They want meals to
be healthier again. Um And when kids do return to school,
I kept hearing from people, it's going to be more
important than ever to realize that school is a place
of learning, but it's also a place where bodies grow,
and we need to recenter and think about kids health
as part of what what they gain and what they
and what they lose when they're out of school. Sam Block,
(19:20):
staff writer at the Counter, Thank you very much for
joining us, Thanks so much for having me. That's it
for this weekend. Be sure to check out The Daily
Dive every Monday through Friday. Join us on social media
at Daily Dive pod on Twitter and Daily Dive Podcast
(19:41):
on Facebook. Leave us a comment, give us a rating,
and tell us the stories that you're interested in. Follow
The Daily Dive and I Heard Radio or subscribe wherever
you get your podcast. This episode of The Daily Dive
has been engineered by Tony Sargentina. I'm Oscar Ramirez in
Los Angeles and this was your Daily Dive weekend edition
Welcome to the Daily Dive Weekend edition. I'm Oscar Ramirez,
and every week I explore the top stories making waves
in the news and some that are just playing interesting.
I'll connect you with the journalists and the people who
know the story and bring you news without the noise
so you can make an informed decision. You can catch
a new episode of The Daily Dive every Monday through Friday,
and it's ready when you wake up. On the weekend edition,
(00:27):
I'll be bringing you some of the best stories from
the week. On the coronavirus front, there's a lot of
concern about these variants that are floating around, especially as
we're making a hard push to get as many people
vaccinated as we can. One of the big questions with
all of this is why are these different strains emerging now.
One answer to this is time. The virus has always
(00:47):
been mutating since the beginning, and these variants can be
a response to increasing herd immunity, response to treatments, and
just evolutionary changes due to the time it has been circulating.
For more on these COVID variants, will speak to Brian Resnick,
Senior Science reporter. For as long as this pandemic has
been going on. The virus has been changing it every
time it gets into a human body, it makes copies
(01:09):
of itself. And every time it makes a copy, it
can make a copy air and that's like the source
of mutation. That's the source of like how things change,
and so you know it, it does seem a little
peculiar that throughout the pandemic there have been like different variants,
There have been different changes in the virus, but they
haven't stood out to scientists until now. They haven't been
(01:33):
associated with the concerning things. So the things about these
variants that are concerning is in the case of that
B one one seven, which is the UK variant or
sometimes called that UM, that one seems to be more
transmissible those other ones you mentioned. You know, there's some
worries about maybe they're these variants are getting a little
bit better at evading our our immune systems UM. But
(01:58):
you know, to answer the question, shouldn't have why now, Well,
one big answer to that is just like there's been
a lot of time. You know, we can think about
this in a few ways, like one like the as
the virus UH spreads between person to person, it can
it can accumulate more changes through you know, that natural
(02:21):
mutation process, and you know, if you're looking at a
virus that has spread to ninety plus million confirmed cases
around the globe, that's a lot of chances to change. Uh.
You know, that doesn't explain to all of it, but
it does explain some of it that you know, you
would expect the diversity, the genetic diversity of the virus
(02:42):
at different forms that could possibly take to increase over time.
And one of those things kind of adding on too
that a lot of this has to do with time
and the amount of times that the virus has been replicating,
but also partial human immunity. Right, a lot of people
have gotten it. We have the vaccines rolling out now,
so that's starting to build up also, so you kind
of pressure the virus to make its own changes to
(03:05):
keep on living basically, And that's kind of one of
the things that they suspect with the Brazil variant. It
might have changed just enough where you could be more
susceptible to getting COVID nineteen if you've already had it,
just because of the way it's changed. What we're describing
here is evolution, and evolution has two components, and one
is change. One is variation, and so that was I
(03:27):
was just describing, you know, throughout the pandemic, the viruses
and a lot of opportunities to change. But that doesn't
explain necessarily why we see some variants more than others.
And for that, you know, that's the other half of evolution,
which is selection or natural selection, which is that you know,
now we're operating in an environment where maybe some of
(03:50):
these variants have a little bit of an advantage. So
I think in particular, this is what the concern is
in Brazil where there have been area is in Brazil
that where that there had horrible outbreaks, huge proportions of
the population were infected, and now there seems to be
this new variant that seems to still be infecting people.
(04:12):
And the idea there is that there's possibly a lot
of of immunity there and that immunity is acting as
a selection pressure. So if you're a viral variant that's
a little bit better at evading you know, the immune
response that has been generated so far, then maybe you
start to gain a little foothold, you start to outcompete
(04:34):
the other variants, and then suddenly you know you have
a huge portion or huge population of people carrying a
variant that looks a little different than the variants that
were circulating the last year. One of the other interesting
parts of this, and as we can mention it, you know,
a lot of this just happens over time and with
(04:54):
the virus mutating every single time. But there's some theories
as to why these variants might have gotten stronger, and
one of them has to do that it might have
emerged in an immunocompromised person, so it had some time
to maybe learn how to get around the immune system
in one of these people. And the other one has
to do with maybe using convalescent plasma. We're using those
(05:15):
treatments as part of putting anybodies into people, but also
one of these things where you know, it's sensing these anybodies,
so it's learning how to get around those things. When
I talked to scientists about this, the way they put
it to me is like rare things can start to
happen when the pandemic has raged on for such a
long time. So you know, you mentioned immuno compromised person,
(05:38):
and so there are some people that when they get infected,
like their immune systems aren't as strong as others and
they can put up a little bit of a fight,
but not the complete fight. And what that leads to
and that person is that they end up living with
the virus for a really long time. So in the
normal course of an illness, someone get sick and effective
(06:01):
as the virus, and then their system clears them of
that virus, you know, hopefully within a matter of like
a week or two. But some people can have that
virus kind of fighting in their immune system, fighting with
their immune system for like weeks and weeks and months
and months. And so when I said, like a rare
thing can happen, like, you know, throughout the pandemic, you know,
(06:22):
we've been trying to protect vulnerable people and hopefully immuno
compromise people have been mostly um staying safe. But you know,
a virus can get into him, you know, compromised person.
It can. The longer it is in that fight with
antibodies that are kind of hurting it, but you know,
not completely eliminating it, the more chances it has to
(06:45):
mutate and change within any individual body, the more chances
it has to learn how to completely swart or more
or not completely, but swart a little bit more of
that immune response. So like an immunoc compromise person is
kind of like a little bit of of a of
a stage for evolution to happen, because a person can
(07:08):
be infective was such a long time again, that's like
really rare, Like a lot of things have to happen
that person. That person would also have to pass it
on to somebody else, you know, after it's been kind
of working in there. I have a friend who had
a kidney transplant and he's basically been on lockdown for
about a year for fear of contracting COVID nineteen at
Also luckily he hasn't, but you know, that's always been
(07:31):
a worry, and then you know, how do you treat
it if he does come down with it. So a
lot of this has to do these variants. We find
out about them by doing this uh genetic sequencing of
the virus, And with coronavirus specifically, it hadn't really been
done that much. I know with the flu they've been
doing it for a long time. But that's why a
lot of experts are pushing for these things to be
(07:53):
looked into more and and constantly sequence these genomes so
that we know when something is popping up so we
can then attack it. We're seeing vaccine makers on the
other side, Maderna saying we need a booster shot, we
might tweak the vaccine. To deal with these variants as
they pop up, you kind of need two things. They're like, yes,
you need greater surveillance of the viral genetics. And the
(08:15):
US does lag on this compared to other countries that
are really good at it, like the UK. But you
need to match that data with what's happening in the
real world. Like I said, variants can pop up all
the time, and sometimes they're just meaningless. Sometimes, like you know,
a virus can have random genetic changes that don't really
make it any more dangerous. So what you really need
(08:38):
is like a really careful way to study this. So
if there is a new variant, you can ask a
question like, oh, is this new variant associated with a
larger and larger proportion of cases? You can ask a question, oh,
is this new variant associated with a more severe disease
course or reinfections? Is it more associated with infecting people
(08:59):
who at all already been infected with the virus and
and so, yeah, this surveillance is one part of it.
But it's also just in general, like we need really
good data, we need to understand how the pandemic is
progressing across the country. Yeah, and that's exactly what's going
on with these. You know, we understand the UK variant
a little bit more than we do the one from
(09:20):
South Africa and Brazil, and will constantly be hearing about
these as they start to possibly take hold. You know,
as I said, the South African variant has just been
detected in South Carolina, so we'll see how much that
one has a chance to spread. Brian Resnick, Senior science
reporter at Vox, thank you very much for joining us.
Of course, finally for this week. Childhood obesity is an
(09:45):
ongoing problem that has only been made worse by the pandemic.
The huge disruptions to the regular school year has impacted
the amount of movement school kids are engaging in, as
well was their diets, and it could have a lasting
effect on their health. Kids tend to gain weight over
summer when there is no school, and many the pandemic
has been similar to a ten months summer break. Furthermore,
some of the most nutritious meals many kids were eating.
(10:06):
We're in school settings For more on this, will speak
to Sam Block, staff writer at the Counter. You mentioned
the childhood obesity crisis was a problem before the pandemic.
According to the most recent data that the federal government
has a little over nine of school aged children are obese,
and there are some predictions that that will rise, the
(10:28):
extent to which is not known yet, But I spoke
with a researcher who studies summerweight game. He looks into
what happens when kids are out of school, and he
figured that if kids were out of school for five
months this year, the national obesity rate would rise by
another four percent. So that's just five months of typical
(10:51):
out of school activity, and that's related mostly to uh
poor diet because kids aren't getting the healthy, nutritious foods
that they normally during the school year, and also surprisingly
sedentary activity. I think a lot of people tend to
think of summer as a time when we're running around
at the beach or playing sports, but kids actually spend
more time in front of screens when they're out of school.
(11:15):
So between the inferior diet and the sedentary activity, the
summer has a lot of similarities to the pandemic. And
again this prediction that the obesity rate is going up
for it's just a prediction. No one really knows what's
going to happen. But that's just for five months out
of school. We've now been out of school for ten months,
and we have these extenuating circumstances like um rising, food
(11:36):
and security, and poverty. So pediatricians, public health experts, even
some dieticians I spoke to from my story are afraid
that this could get really bad. Some of them had
said it's kind of like a ten month long summer
in effect, just because of the way of the shutdowns
and how all the disruptions to normal school life have
gone for children. Start me off with some of the
pediatricians and dietitians you've talked to, and tell me about
(11:59):
what they're seeing in their patients. So I spoke to
pediatricians in the Bay Area. I spoke to one in
Portland's book to one in Minneapolis. Their stories were very similar.
They have patients who are coming in who are you know,
as young as say five, six seven years old, who
used to be in the twenty percentile for their body
(12:19):
mass index. So that's a way of gauging your relative
height and weight, and they went from the twenty five
percentile too in a matter of months to seventy five percentile.
Now being in the seventy five percentile isn't itself a problem,
But when you gain that much weight over such a
short period of time, that worries them. That's one pediatrician.
Another one told me they had patients who are going
into the eighty five percentile, where you're clinically overweight, into
(12:42):
the ninety percentile where you're clinically obese. Some we're telling
me they saw kids who are putting on ten or
twenty pounds since the pandemic started in March. I spoke
to one who said that she had a patient, an
eleven year old girl I believe, who put on forty
pounds during the pandemic. As kids are growing, they should
be gaining weight. But when you're gaining that much weight soly,
pedetricians worry that that that could have adverse health effects
(13:03):
and that they're not going to lose that weight as
they get older. We've been hearing about coverage about this
throughout the pandemic. The Quarantine fifteen, you know, people kind
of jokingly giving it that name, you know, but if
that's happening with normal adults, people who can take care
of themselves, etcetera, etcetera. It's also happening to our children,
and it's diet is part of that. And this is
kind of where a lot of school lunch programs really
(13:26):
come into focus and how important it is both on
you know, kids actually getting meals, but also the nutritional
part of it. I think this is what drew me
to this story, was just hearing from people who are
concerned not so much about quote unquote empty bellies, but
the quality of the food that kids were eating. In America,
Starvation usually isn't the consequence of poverty, it's obesity. And
(13:51):
part of the reason why people are so concerned about
kids missing school meals is that, for I think twenty
two in school children who live near the poverty line,
school lunch is actually some of the healthiest food that
they can get. Now, you and I we probably grew
up at a time when school lunch wasn't so healthy.
We're probably thinking about sloppy Joe's and you know, fatty yeah, exactly.
(14:16):
But but that's changed during the Obama administration and at
the time, you know, I think there were a lot
of jokes, a lot of thanks Michelle Obama about school
food that look pretty unappetising. But the fact is these
school lunch changes have impacted child health. For the better,
kids who eat school lunch have to eat a certain
amount of fruit every day, a range of vegetables from
(14:38):
leafy greens to lagumes. They have to eat breads, pastas,
and muffins and other grains that are made with at
least fifty whole grain flour, which is richer in dietary fibers,
so it helps the body um it helps keep down
body weight. School lunches also had to cut back on
saturated fats and conform to age specific limits on calories
and sodium. That's part of an effort to drive down
(14:59):
hypertension and TA managers. And again, all of these changes,
the evidence is suggesting that this has impacted child health.
To the better, kids who eat school meals every day
consume more fruits and vegetables, fewer fats and sugars, have
better diets, lower weight, lower rates of unhealthy weight gain,
And as an epidemiologist told me, it's not just that
school lunch is healthier than it used to be. It's
(15:20):
healthier than a bag lunch brought from home, and now
enter the pandemic remote learning. You know, how do you
even feed kids that are not going to school? And
on the other side of things, cafeteria workers and whatnot,
they're not actually cooking a lot of these mills anymore
because of the way these rules have changed. So now
they're doing a lot of prepackaged, processed foods, which could
be worse for these diets. And it's important to remember
(15:43):
that the cafeteria workers who have been putting together these
meals for kids who aren't even in classrooms a lot
of the time, they deserve a lot of credit and
they deserve a lot of praise for being on the
front lines to help these children. That said, there are
some very real changes to the way they're all to
put together these meals. You know, staffing is down. There
(16:04):
were a lot of rules initially that were about the
safety of even cooking in the first place. It was
thought that, you know, packaged meals wrapped in plastic, we're
going to be safer to transmit and safer to distribute.
And as a result of a lot of these federal
waivers that have just made it easier for cafeteria staff
to put bag lunches together to go on routes and
delivering meals. You don't have the hot, nutritious, scratch cooked
(16:28):
meals that kids normally have in the cafeteria. You don't
know the salad bars, which a few dieticians told me
made them really sad. You know that for years they
had spent time working on kids, kind of training and
convincing them to get into leafy greens and like guns
and vegetables they wouldn't normally like. By giving them the
option of going to salad bars, that's all gone. Now
you have a lot of frozen foods. You have a
(16:48):
lot of shelf stable foods, processed foods, frozen burritos, salty snacks, chips,
fruit juice, vegetable juice, things that aren't bad per se.
But if that's in place of the healthy, nutritious meal
that you used to eat, kids are missing out on
a lot of nutrients. This year and again, this change
was made to make it easier to feed kids. So
(17:10):
what are the challenges going forward? I mean, there's a
lot of long term consequences because of this um You know,
what are those consequences and what are health officials, what
are schools trying to do to remedy that. The long
term consequences I think you know the dietitians that I
spoke to who worked on revamping school meals after the
Obama reforms. One long term consequence might be that kids
(17:33):
are going to lose their taste for vegetables and they're
just going to sort of revert back to starchy potatoes
and salty snacks and and uncrustables and pop tarts. The
other is the more serious consequence of childhood obesity, because
sixty seven percent of kids who are obese at five
years old will be obese at fifty and oviese adolescents
(17:53):
will remain obese adults. And when you become an obvioue adult,
you have higher risk for conditions like diabetes and hypertension
in potentially fatal medical events like heart attacks and strokes.
So this all just kind of adds up, and we worry,
And when I say we, I mean the public health
experts and epidemiologists I talked to worry about the long
term health consequences of this. I guess generation of pandemic kids.
(18:16):
In terms of what we can do about that. Obesity
has so many causes there's no one silver bullet. Yes,
the changes to school meals, and yes, the fact that
kids are missing these school meals and eating other food
at home is contributing to it. It's not the only
thing that's contributing to it. But if we do want
to attack and work on the diet piece, I heard
over and over again that the main thing that schools
have to do is return to these Obama era standards
(18:38):
for nutrition and for what goes in meals. Your listeners
may know that at the very end of his administration,
Donald Trump was able to push through rules to roll
back I'm sorry, he pushed through rules that rolled back
restrictions on UM, on whole grains, and sodium and flavored milk.
(19:00):
People want those all to return. They want meals to
be healthier again. Um And when kids do return to school,
I kept hearing from people, it's going to be more
important than ever to realize that school is a place
of learning, but it's also a place where bodies grow,
and we need to recenter and think about kids health
as part of what what they gain and what they
and what they lose when they're out of school. Sam Block,
(19:20):
staff writer at the Counter, Thank you very much for
joining us, Thanks so much for having me. That's it
for this weekend. Be sure to check out The Daily
Dive every Monday through Friday. Join us on social media
at Daily Dive pod on Twitter and Daily Dive Podcast
(19:41):
on Facebook. Leave us a comment, give us a rating,
and tell us the stories that you're interested in. Follow
The Daily Dive and I Heard Radio or subscribe wherever
you get your podcast. This episode of The Daily Dive
has been engineered by Tony Sargentina. I'm Oscar Ramirez in
Los Angeles and this was your Daily Dive weekend edition
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