We need healthier adults and healthier kids

Two initiatives prominently announced by Mayor Adams — instituting a healthy plant-based diet in city schools, and adding a brief period of mindful breathing to improve kids’ mental health — are not some New Age distractions. They are critical and long-overdue acknowledgements that New York City’s 920,000 public school children face unprecedented levels of physical illness and mental distress.

These kids spent formative years under pandemic lockdown and blaring news of a life-threatening virus. They are aware of ever-present threats of violence and routinely witness to disturbing street scenes of moaning and passed out drug users; 10% are homeless.

Even before the toxic cloud from Canadian wildfires descended on them, our kids had one of America’s highest childhood asthma hospitalization and death rates. While we don’t have detailed data, we can assume that the soaring youth diabetes rates reported in other cities during COVID were made worse here by the city’s long lockdown and the long relegation of kids to “remote learning” that kept them from even taking part in the school sports and activities needed to stay well.

Improving the diets of 920,000 public school children is a huge step forward in the struggle to counter chronic diseases — especially the rampant diabetes that so disproportionately affects poor, working class and minority communities. Fatty liver disease, typically a “silent condition” at the start, is directly fueled by excess blood sugar. It is claiming more and more kids — with up to 10% to 20% of school kids affected in various studies. It is not silent forever. It significantly propels early diabetes and severe long-term liver disease.

Researchers have shown they could start to reverse kids’ fatty liver disease in nine days just by minimizing the sugar content of their food even while letting them eat the same number of calories. NYC cannot supply all the food all day long for kids as the researchers did, but even minimizing sugar and processed food in school breakfasts and lunches will help guard against ill health.

The administration’s plan to revise school menus got a bumpy start last fall — when many kids noisily rejected the plant-based meals. But the Department of Education then formed a board of 12 prominent chefs who have produced recipes now being tested out and voted on by hundreds of parents and kids. This fall, when the chosen recipes for breakfast and lunch appear, we can hope for much more enthusiasm.

The deep breathing and mindfulness period the mayor wants to provide will yield long-term mental health benefits for kids reeling from their regular exposure to personal and public crises and struggling in the aftermath of the pandemic.

As we know, there aren’t mental health counselors for all kids who need them, but there are also good reasons in themselves for mindfulness and deep breathing. For the thousands of distraught kids to learn to calm their own minds is another benefit with lifetime potential. These techniques can be easily taught; kids can use them not just in school, but when they need them, helping save the limited supply of mental health personnel for the kids in the deepest distress.

As a bonus, deep breathing, by strengthening children’s lungs, can help reduce asthma emergencies.

These initiatives did begin with a mayor who famously reversed his own diabetes through plant-based eating and who practices Transcendental Meditation and deep breathing. But they are far beyond representing a mayoral whim; they are now well planned, evidence-based, groundbreaking steps to address a double disaster of failing physical and mental health that would seem almost beyond solution.

Yet, sadly, In the midst of impressive planning and progress for kids, the city has chosen to continue its disastrous failure to address the adult diabetes epidemic which has destroyed neighborhood after neighborhood. To have the full effect for kids requires also addressing adults; it requires the Health Department, after two decades of neglecting diabetes, to finally support the community-driven self-care and preventive education programs proven to help people bring down their blood sugar and complications.

New York has seen a 100% increase in diabetes-related lower limb amputations in just the past decade — amputations that even the American Diabetes Association considers 85% preventable with self-care education and proper clinical care. Kids see that, too — all the people in their neighborhoods with missing feet confined to wheelchairs.

How will kids ultimately believe that health is possible when the adults around them are staggering under ever-growing rates of diabetes-induced kidney failure, amputation, and blindness — horrible occurrences that are substantially preventable? For adults, we aren’t even attempting to prevent diabetes, our most widespread disease.

Norwood is the executive director of Health People in the Bronx.