Transcription of Dr. Kevin Strong for the show Connecting Kids with Food, #77
Dr. Lisa: Anyone who has kids knows that it can be quite a challenge to try to step outside of the mainstream messaging that takes place and try to encourage them to eat healthy foods and not necessarily eat the types of things that they’re seeing the pop stars’ eating on television. Dr. Kevin Strong especially knows this. He is the CEO and co-founder of Dunk the Junk and a pediatrician who has practiced formerly in the Mid-Coast Region and now in Lewiston. We’re really happy to have you in to talk about your PEP project, Dr. Strong.
Dr. Kevin: Thanks for having me. That was a nice intro.
Dr. Lisa: It’s impressive the work that you’ve done. I’m looking at right now a poster that is just very graphically interesting in a way that I don’t see often in public health, the top 10 foods to dunk. The art really grabs one’s attention especially if I was a child looking at this poster. It would really grab my attention. I think that’s been the preface, it’s been the premise of what you’re trying to do is communicate with kids in a way that they understand.
Dr. Kevin: I think your intro also kind of touched on this. I think it’s really challenging for parents these days to steer their children towards healthy eating. There’s so much advertising pumped at them encouraging them to eat junk food and junk food’s cool. Parents have to of course tried and battled that which is it’s difficult when the access isn’t even great.
The idea with the project really at the heart of it is to brand healthy eating, make it cool to not eat junk food and make it cool to eat healthy food and that’s what that effort is.
Dr. Lisa: Tell me about these top 10 foods. What are they and why did you choose them? You don’t have to go through them all in order if you haven’t memorized them but why this top one is especially interesting to me.
Dr. Kevin: I think the mission statement really for our project is to dismantle the junk food epidemic and really what that means is to reverse the childhood of this big epidemic. Obesity is caused by excessive sugar consumption mainly in sugar sweetened drinks. We know that. There are tons of articles that confirmed that. The idea with the top 10 foods is to really take that science and make it executable in a cool program.
They’re basically all sugar-based. There are a number of them that are drinks because again you get the most impact by taking the sugary drinks out. Then you dunk it and it becomes the alternative on process forms. The most easy one to translate would be a fruit roll-up becomes a piece of fruit or a veggie pops becomes a vegetable. We preach to just eat from the earth. Eat food in its original form. That’s basically how those came about.
Dr. Lisa: This top one is soda. You’re dunking out, like literally dunking it through a basketball hoop which is something that kids understand. I know that you’ve gone out and you’ve done some work in the community and you’ve had basketball players come in and do some dunking. It’s a very strong visual. You dunk it through hoop and it becomes water or milk. One 12-ounce soda has 10 teaspoons of added sugar. That’s pretty significant.
Dr. Kevin: That’s the 12-ounce. That’s the smallest form.
Dr. Lisa: That’s the 7-11 big Gulp.
Dr. Kevin: No. You could just do the math. The original big Gulp is 44 ounces. Approximately four times the 12-ounce so you’re looking at 40 teaspoons.
Dr. Lisa: You even have this on your poster. The American Heart Association recommends that adult women consume six teaspoon of added sugar or less per day. Adult men consume nine teaspoons of added sugar or less per day. That’s an adult. If you drink one soda then you’ve already surpassed that by quite a lot as a child.
Dr. Kevin: Yup. A lot of people are drinking a lot more soda than that. There’s also a lot of sugar, a lot of sugar served at the school lunches and breakfasts. I did in a school district in Maine or may mean less because it’s pretty consistent around the district. It’s not meant to single anyone out and around the country. If you have breakfast and lunch at school which a lot of the underserved kids or kids’ families who are struggling to get by. A lot of them are eating there. They get 31 teaspoons of sugar by eating breakfast and lunch at school which is five times what the American Heart Association recommends right at school.
Then if you went home and had a little bit of soda, some juices or whatever, you can see where you’re getting to these really, really high and toxic levels of sugar consumption. That’s what the science tells us.
Dr. Lisa: What does sugar do? People are listening probably has some sense but review that for us because it’s significant.
Dr. Kevin: This is my easiest question to answer because the girly gets to the science and the research. It’s pretty scary where the science is starting to point us on what sugar has really been doing. It’s important to stress that we’re talking about sugar in insane levels. I’m not saying sugar is in normal consumption amounts back thousand years ago it was toxic.
The sugar at the levels we’re consuming is toxic. Obviously, everybody knows that it increases your risk of obesity. Then you can extrapolate the morbidities from obesity. Obesity increases your risk of various types of cancers. Sugar consumption makes you obese and obesity increases your risk of a number of cancers by the transit of property you can associate those.
A lot of the top researchers right now in cancer research are working on insulin-like growth factors. Insulin is an anabolic or pro-growth hormone. If you have highest levels of sugar all the time, your insulin is always up. You have an anabolic hormone coursing through your body. That’s not good. It’s pro-growth. It’s oncogenic. Many people think it could create cancer growth environments.
If anyone wants to read more about that, there’s an article in New York Times Magazine April 2011 written by Gary Taubes. I don’t know if I’m pronouncing it right, Taubes. It’s called Is Sugar Toxic? It’s a great review of this. It will bring you the links where you can read more about it. Otherwise, I’ll consume the whole interview right into that.
Dr. Lisa: It is interesting too because it appears in things that you wouldn’t necessarily think are unhealthy and things that we’ve encouraged people to eat, granola bars. A granola bar can have four teaspoons of added sugar and fruit or vanilla yogurt. A six-ounce fruit or a vanilla yogurt has three and a half teaspoons of added sugar. Peanut butter can have one teaspoon of added sugar per serving and also hydrogenated vegetable oil instead of peanut oil if you’re having a cheap substitute.
There are things that we give to our children routinely that we think are good for them but something there’s a disconnect there. One of the articles on your website, I believe it is Mother Jones.
Dr. Kevin: Yeah.
Dr. Lisa: It talked about the sugar industry. I think it was 1976 that our sugar consumption was down. We weren’t as obese. People aren’t spending as much to eat sweet food. The sugar industry said. “Well, this doesn’t really work for us. We need to put some money into telling people how healthy it is.” They even promoted sugar as something that’s good for being on a diet ironically.
Dr. Kevin: Yeah. That article does a real good job outlining as far as the propaganda that’s going on over the years. Similar to other industries where science was starting to show us things weren’t good for us and big money was involved. People came out with their own campaigns to keep sales up. That article really details that chronology really well. It lets you know that this has been going on a long time. Now we’re seeing the impacts of not acting earlier.
Dr. Lisa: It’s also interesting for me because as I’m reading it, I’m starting to feel … and I don’t have a problem with marketing per se. I start to feel a little bit deceived because it’s not just that I’m eating sugar because I crave it myself as an individual when I want something a little sweet. I’m eating sugar because these messages are so constant and they’re so pervasive. They’re out there and being aimed at our children.
Dr. Kevin: Yeah.
Dr. Lisa: You have small children so how does that make you feel as a father and a doctor that this is such an ongoing and difficult thing to combat?
Dr. Kevin: That’s another amazing question that could have a really long answer weaving in child’s psychology. I would say for my own children, we don’t have a TV in our home. It wasn’t originally because I didn’t want to expose them to advertising per se. I just didn’t want that to distract our ability to communicate as a family.
Now when they catch TV when we’re out, they see an ad and they’re like, “I want that. I want that. I want that.” It’s true that they see an ad for whatever. It could be of upholstery repair stuff. My daughter will be like, “I want that. Let’s get that.” They say it’s the best because they haven’t seen this. They haven’t been invaded with them too. It really has shown me the power of those marketers and those ads.
Dr. Lisa: You were an outpatient community pediatrician. Now you’re an inpatient pediatrician. Are you still seeing the effects of sugar consumption and obesity on the health of the children that you deal with in the hospital?
Dr. Kevin: Yeah, totally. It’s different. It’s difficult because in the inpatient setting, you’re dealing often with acute problem that’s come up. You always try and see the patient as a whole so you can see some more chronic issues that the patient may have. Fortunately, at Central Maine Medical Center where I work, they’ve done a really good job of supporting us. I often feel that I have time in the rooms to do things I couldn’t even have done as an outpatient doctor, occupation things and they’re open to that.
I think that’s good medicine. If you have patient interaction, why just treat the acute problem? Why not give a little preventive counseling and stuff?
Dr. Lisa: How do families respond when you do some other preventive counseling in the inpatient setting?
Dr. Kevin: I always wait until I have a relationship with the patient at least the second day of the hospitalization. I think the difficult potential discussion, you have to have relationship with the patient. At least it increases your chances of things really going in the right direction and really motivating. I wanted to go back to that last question really also though because talking about kids and motivating kids and the kids like it. I forgot to say that that’s also really what this is about. It’s about kids, educating kids that junk food is bad for you and companies are just using you. Having kids decide, young children, teens decide, “I don’t want to eat junk food.”
We all know any parent know you tell your child not to do something, no one of any age likes to be told what to do. The idea is to have kids vote with their own decision. It’s not that parental conflict and stuff.
Dr. Lisa: I understand that you’re in the process of opening up a clinic that’s going to deal with healthy eating and kids who needs some help with healthy eating issues. Is that going to incorporate motivating the children themselves to make changes in their diet?
Dr. Kevin: Yeah. At Central Maine Medical Center, I’m working with the outpatient doctors there, Central Maine Pediatrics to set up two days a month or something initially where kids can come for a nutrition counseling. It really is going to be a pure implementation of Dunk the Junk. There are educational pieces that we have, the infinite children’s book and the poster, top 10 foods to dunk. It’s set up to be tracks and studied and followed up.
That’s the idea. We can have patients come in. If they want to be involved in the study, great; if not, they just get to come and learn about nutrition. They get a poster. They get the stickers. We go through the video. It will be good for me to be actually doing it so I can see how it’s flowing and then when people give me feedback, we can make adjustments to make it even more satisfying for doctors’ offices or school nurses or everyone.
Dr. Lisa: We’ve talked about the poster and the work that you’ve done in schools with having people come in and actually dunking the things on actual basketball hoops. You are interested in starting this very early on you have a book called Eating the Alphabet. You were talking to me recently about the fact that even starting kids with the right finger foods can make a difference. Some of the things that we’ve thought are good finger foods for a really long time actually already have added sugar. We’re starting the kids off turning them out on their palettes with sugar.
Dr. Kevin: The book it’s the animals ate the alphabet and it got some poetries, some literation. It promotes literacy. It’s meant to excite toddlers about trying new foods or an animal trying … tiger having to bully or a polar bear passing on papaya, stuff like that. In the back, is an appendix on solid food introduction in the on-process fashion for infants. At four to six months at the doctor’s office, you get to talk about how to introduce solids and I’m tired of cheerios being the number one finger food. Why does General Mills get the pole position?
That’s what this is. It’s a rewrite. I’m just going to read you this. This is called the doctor’s note leading. Have you ever tried an apple after eating a fruit roll-up? Have you ever tried a carrot after eating a veggie pops? Whole oatmeal after a bowl of cheerios? The brains ability to sense natural taste pleasures is desensitized by the invasion of the supernatural flavor intensities created in big food labs.
I often hear frustrated parents say, “But my child will only eat box of cereals and chicken nuggets.” Yet infants around the world whose diets are not primarily processed foods do not manifest these troublesome tastes preferences. You can change these eating patterns in your household. As more parents like you join in, we can make a difference across the country. This book is here to help you choose healthy foods that your child will ask for again and again.
Almost done. If processed food with added sugars or added salts aren’t overwhelming an infant’s palette, the brain will sense and enjoy natural food in all its subtle sweetness and saltiness. Give your infant’s brain and palette the opportunity to experience the natural flavor intensities of real food. That I think that’s the answer to the why if you keep it out, you’re not going to have problems. I could have never done it as well because that’s pretty tough.
Dr. Lisa: Instead of cheerios, what do you recommend?
Dr. Kevin: We like things in the original state, as close to the original state as possible. You will talk about like barley with the husk on or the oatmeal that is still kernelly and crunchy still. If you have that fibrous course still on as close to the original form as possible, it takes longer to degrade in your stomach. The release of sugar into the body is slower which is really what we’re looking for.
Dr. Lisa: Most doctors don’t go the path you’re going down. How did you get here?
Dr. Kevin: I think the real answer, it’s more just about I wanted to find a way to connect with kids and these ideas are things kids would love and enjoy their exciting things, arts or that kind of thing.
Dr. Lisa: Then because you knew that this is the type of thing that you connected with when you were a kid?
Dr. Kevin: I think there’s a little bit of that sort of paying attention to both what I like still and what kids coming into my practice as we’re talking about. I did some informal poling the year is leading up to starting this. We asked kids, “What are your interests? What are your activities?” when they come in for physical. It’s on a general checklist. You have a pretty good sense of your population.
The big piece of that obviously is our social media and our web presence and our use of video. That’s probably our strongest piece is our edited, sound edited videos.
Dr. Lisa: Where can people watch the videos, find out more about Dunk the Junk, order the Animals Eat the Alphabet book or all the various projects that you’re involved in?
Dr. Kevin: We have this website, it’s the easiest you can get to everything through it. There are tabs at the top, shop or calendar, stuff like that. It’s www.dunkthejunk.org. Then there’s an F and a T on that page. It will take you to the Facebook or Twitter. I encourage people to check those out. We try and be funny. We post a lot of art.
Dr. Lisa: Dr. Kevin Strong, it’s been a pleasure to spend time with you. You’re clearly very passionate about what you do and you’re very creative within the way that you’re approaching kids’ nutrition. I think it’s so important given what we know about the state of kids’ health right now in our community. Thank you for spending time with me and talking with me more about this important project.
Dr. Kevin: Write back at you. Thanks for doing what you do. It’s so important to get the educational message out. This is a kind of outlet that can do it. Thank you.