Can Michelle Obama's Drinks for Kids Help Tackle Pediatric Obesity?

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Former First Lady Michelle Obama is continuing her campaign against pediatric obesity by founding a health food company and a new line of kids' drinks, as healthcare professionals call for more attention to this public health challenge.

Obama announced the launch of PLEZi Nutrition at the Wall Street Journal's Future of Everything Festival last week, which will focus on "lowering sugar content and lowering sweetness to help adjust kids' palates to crave less sweetness overall" with the ultimate aim of reducing sugary drinks and snacks, according to the company.

Its first product is a kids' drink that the company says has 75% less sugar than average leading 100% fruit juices. It's also said to have no added sugar, but includes fiber and nutrients, such as potassium, magnesium, and zinc.

"I've learned that on this issue, if you want to change the game, you can't just work from the outside," Obama said during her remarks at the WSJ event. "You've got to get inside -- you've got to find ways to change the food and beverage industry itself."

Michelle Katzow, MD, MS, of Northwell Health in New York, told MedPage Today that childhood obesity continues to be a significant public health challenge in the U.S.

"It's not necessarily the obesity itself," rather the increased risk for issues later in life, said Katzow, who serves as medical director of the POWER Kids Weight Management Program at Cohen Children's Medical Center and assistant professor of pediatrics at the Zucker School of Medicine at Hofstra/Northwell. "What we care about is long-term chronic diseases."

"We are living in a really complex world that makes it really hard for some bodies to grow in a way that's healthy," Katzow said.

Amid such complexities, literature published in Pediatrics earlier this year marked the American Academy of Pediatrics' first clinical practice guideline outlining evidence-based evaluation and treatment for children and adolescents with overweight (defined as a body mass index [BMI] at or above the 85th percentile and below the 95th percentile) or obesity (defined as a BMI at or above the 95th percentile).

Solving the problem of childhood obesity is complex, but Katzow said policies that make healthy and nutritious food available to everyone, and that better address access to medical care, will help to truly move the needle.

As for healthy beverages for kids? "In general, the healthiest drinks for kids are not special products," Katzow said.

Kids should be drinking water and milk, she said, adding that other drinks are fine in moderation but not particularly helpful or necessary for a healthy diet. Eating whole fruits and vegetables is also preferred to fruit drinks, she said.

Indeed, PLEZi Nutrition said it would designate a "sizable portion" of its marketing budget to "promotional content around what's best for kids' health."

"PLEZi Nutrition believes kids should be drinking water as their primary beverage," the company stated, adding that it "will actively promote drinking water and eating whole fruits and vegetables," and that its kids' drink "is intended to replace sugary drinks and snacks that do not support kids' health and to help promote healthier habits."

In a piece entitled, "What to Do When What's Best Is Impossible," Emily Oster, PhD, a member of PLEZi's Kitchen Cabinet advisory group, wrote the following on parenting and embracing a "second-best" option: "I know the pushback on this, because I get it all the time -- if we tell people about the second best, they won't kill themselves to do the first best. Here is the thing: they're usually not doing the first best anyway, because it is impossible. And often the difference in actual outcomes between the first and second best is very small, whereas both are much better than many of the outer-darkness alternatives."

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