Elementary schools that provide easy access to drinking water and education about its benefits may help their students maintain a healthy weight, a new study found.
Researchers examined the health and drinking habits of 1249 children in 26 low-income, ethnically diverse elementary schools in the San Francisco Bay Area. In half of the schools, water stations were placed throughout, along with signs explaining why water is healthier than sugary drinks. In addition, assemblies were held explaining the advantages of water over sugary drinks.
Dr Anisha Patel
That simple message seemed to have had an outsized effect. Schools with water stations had significantly fewer overweight students than the other schools by the end of the 15-month study, according to Anisha Patel, MD, MSPH, MSHS, associate professor of pediatrics at Stanford University, who will be presenting the findings at the Pediatric Academic Societies (PAS) 2022 Meeting, in Denver.
"Sugar-sweetened beverages are a huge contributor to obesity," Patel told Medscape Medical News. "This provides a key strategy for schools to adopt, and the time is right for this type of work ― in the pandemic period we've seen significant increases in obesity. Investments like this could help stem that."
According tothe US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 14.4 million children aged 2 to 19 years in the United States ― about 19% of all kids in that age range ― were obese in 2017–2018. The agency said the rate of increase in body mass index (BMI) among this group nearly doubled during the COVID-19 pandemic.
