A recent study conducted by a professor at the University of Minnesota suggests that schools using bake sales and junk-food-based rewards systems may have more over weight students. The study's author, Martha Kubik, is quick to admit that her findings don't present a direct connection between such school practices and childhood obesity, but they do allude to a link. Kubik's study looked at over 3,000 eighth-graders in 16 Minneapolis-St. Paul schools, and whether or not those schools used certain "food practices," such as using food as incentive or raising funding through the sale of food. Over half of the schools in the study allowed at least one of these. The study pointed out seven practices in all, and for each practice allowed in a given school, researchers found the body-mass index students to be 10 percent higher.
An abstract of the study, which appears in the most recent issue of the Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine, is available here.
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