Rising to the Family Challenge

Join Five Families in Eating Better, Moving More and Getting Healthy

Parents pass down a lot to their children, from hair and eye color to family heirlooms. But these days, an increasing number of children inherit something else: obesity and inactivity.

According to the latest government figures, nearly two-thirds of American adults are overweight or obese. And how much a parent weighs is the single most important predictor of whether a child will be overweight or obese.

Not surprisingly, childhood obesity has more than tripled over the past 40 years, according to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. About one in six youngsters ages 6 to 19 is now obese and at increased risk for type 2 diabetes, high blood pressure, elevated blood cholesterol levels and premature heart disease. An additional 15 percent of children and teens are at risk of becoming obese.

But there's also evidence that the families who grow large together can change together. With that in mind, this week we kick off the Lean Plate Club Fit for Fun Family Challenge. During the next four weeks, you'll find simple food and exercise goals to help your family spring into a healthier summer, whether you want to be more active, tweak your eating habits or both.

Along the way, you'll meet five Lean Plate Club families from the District, Maryland and Virginia. Like you and your family, they're already doing some things right, but want to do better. They'll be taking the challenge with you and we'll report on their progress in the coming weeks.

Getting children to eat more fruit and vegetables might sound like a challenge in itself, but it's an easy place to start making some habit changes -- without resorting to threats, bribes or begging.

"When people talk about restructuring their diets, they usually talk about deprivation," notes Dianne Neumark-Sztainer, professor of epidemiology at the University of Minnesota School of Public Health and author of "I'm, Like, So Fat: Helping Your Teen Make Healthy Choices About Eating and Exercise in a Weight-Obsessed World" (Guilford, 2005). "With fruit and vegetables, you're talking about adding food, not denying yourself."

Plus, studies in children as young as 2 and as old as teens consistently show that offspring follow parents' eating patterns. So the more fruit and vegetables you eat, the greater the chances that your children will eat more, too. "That's the strongest of all factors in influencing children's eating behavior," says Mary Story, professor of public health at the University of Minnesota. "If Father is saying, 'No way I'll eat that broccoli,' then it's very likely that kids won't eat it, either."

Those fruits and vegetables not only provide key vitamins, minerals, phytonutrients and fiber, but they're also low in calories and high in flavor. A study of 36,000 Minnesota adolescents points to a correlation with academic performance, too. Teens who earned the highest grades were also more likely to eat more fruit and vegetables.

Merely stocking these items, however, doesn't boost kids' intake.

"You need to make these foods not just available, but appetizing and accessible," says Christie Befort, a preventive medicine researcher at the University of Kansas Medical Center in Kansas City and lead author of a new study of fruit and vegetable consumption in 200 teens in the Journal of the American Dietetic Association. "Canned fruit buried in the pantry is not something they are going to eat. They're not likely to eat frozen fruit in the freezer, either, but having fruit and vegetables sitting there to just grab and eat, or cut up and ready to go in the refrigerator makes them easily accessible."

Each week during the challenge, you'll find one way to improve your family's eating habits and at least one way to boost activity. Follow the suggestions and you'll be on your way to a healthier lifestyle.