$500 million against obesity

Have you heard reports about how the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation has pledged $500 million to combat childhood obesity? Here is a link to a PBS report. With that amount of $$$, one would think PBH could or should get a slice of that to promote f/v consumption. With the Wood Johnson's foundation's focus on childhood obesity, it seems a given that its leaders would be advocates for the fruit and vegetable snack program and an alignment of school meals with the 2005 Dietary Guidelines.

From the story:

RAY SUAREZ: For more on how that money will be spent and the health problems faced by overweight children, I'm joined by the foundation's president and CEO, Dr. Risa Lavizzo-Mourey in Princeton, New Jersey.
For the record, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation funds the NewsHour's Health Unit.
Dr. Lavizzo-Mourey, of all the things that face Americans and their health, why put such a large pot of money into research on this particular malady?
DR. RISA LAVIZZO-MOUREY, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation: Well, Ray, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation is the largest private foundation that is focused solely on helping Americans live healthier lives and get the health care they need. And childhood obesity is, frankly, the most urgent health problem facing our kids today.
RAY SUAREZ: Well, in what way? I mean, is this something that we now know, that fat kids become fat adults, for instance, and that's where the costs and the suffering comes?
DR. RISA LAVIZZO-MOUREY: It's a very prevalent problem: 25 million kids are overweight or obese. The rates are rising; they've quadrupled over the last four decades. And we know that the kids who have problems with being overweight or obese are much more likely to have serious medical problems.
RAY SUAREZ: Half a billion dollars over five years is an enormous amount of money. Spin out a time line for me. Help me understand how money granted by the foundation percolates through the system and ends up, at some point in the future, either with a child who never becomes obese in the first place or one who was overweight and is now thinner.
DR. RISA LAVIZZO-MOUREY: Well, we're making a long-term commitment. This is a large amount of money, but a private foundation cannot make this kind of a change, cannot reverse an epidemic of this magnitude by itself. It's going to take action at all levels: government policies, school systems getting involved, families getting involved, and communities becoming healthier places.
So let me give you a couple of examples of how that can work. What we would like to do is fund the evidence, the research that will tell policymakers what kinds of policies might make schools and communities healthier places.
So, for example, years ago, most people walked to school. Now, 90 percent of kids are driven to school, even if they live within a mile of their school. There's an idea out there called the walking school bus, where literally you have an adult who gathers kids, goes door to door, gets the kids, and walks them to school.
Well, those kinds of ideas, if they can have an impact on kids and on the long-term obesity epidemic, we want to disseminate those. But in order for those ideas to really work, there have been to be sidewalks, there have to be safe routes to schools, and we have to have traffic lights near the schools. Those are the kind of policy changes that the Institute of Medicine has recommended to be coupled with these great ideas at the community level.
So what we see our funding as doing over the next five years is funding those kinds of good ideas, seeing whether they're going to work, and then putting the policy changes that are needed to enable them and enable the communities to make those changes in place.
If you think about the example that I gave before, number of people who walk to school two generations ago or 40 years ago as compared to now, think about the kinds of foods that were being served in schools or served at home two generations ago as compared to now. We've seen the portion sizes increasing; we've seen more people eating in restaurants and the families eating in restaurants.
What that means is that kids aren't really able to create an environment and make choices that are default healthy choices. We have to create an environment that allows them to do that.

TK: I see more here about physical fitness than a focus on dietary changes. Hopefully that does not portend a lack of commitment by the foundation to change dietary patterns to reflect more f/v consumption. The Association Finder in Industry Links at right side of the blog reveals that this foundation has assets of a whopping $9.3 billion in 2005. Many of the foundation grants relate to health care and substance abuse prevention. I found only one project funded that contained the keyword of "fruit." The foundation gave $65,000 to a pilot program to increase fruit and vegetable choices through classroom nutrition education and salad bars in a low-income school in Chicago.