TO WHO’s Galea, the food industry needs to take some responsibility, too. He says the industry needs to consider the impact of its food products on the health of consumers in deciding what they should offer. To help push the food industry in that direction, WHO in 2003 began a program with the Department of Health that would give recognition to exemplary food providers.

	The new generation of Filipinos is growing up fatter but not healthier.

These food providers have to meet certain criteria in the health scale, including not allowing smoking, using healthier culinary methods, and providing healthy choices in the menu. Pasig City was the first city to participate in the program and attracted applications for recognition from 40 food establishments. Of these, two were recognized. Mandaluyong and Makati are next to be covered by the program.

For such a program to be relevant and make sense, however, consumers need to be armed with the right information about the nutritive values of the different kinds of food they are being offered. Many would also have to be reintroduced to the concept of exercise.

“The point is to balance,” says Buena. If you have to have those French fries, for instance, go easy on the salt, drink more water, and walk up the stairs instead of taking the lift. Regular physical activity — not just small chunks of time inserted in one’s routine whenever it is convenient — thus becomes currency for food.

Clara, now a trim 13-year-old, has become used to such trade-offs. If she wants a second helping of something — say, a brownie — her mother Malou would have her do the treadmill for more than the usual half-hour. Says Malou: “There’s a price tag in terms of exercise.”

It hasn’t been easy, says Clara, especially when it came to eating vegetables and doing the treadmill. “But I had my mom,” she says. Indeed, the mother who used to rely on canned goods has changed her ways as well and now supervises all the meals prepared at home and makes sure Clara has vegetables in her lunchbox. The 42-year-old magazine editor even experiments with vegetable dishes, hoping to stumble on something that would tickle her daughter’s palate. The results from her kitchen adventures aren’t always hits, but Malou has become a master of bargaining with Clara about doing extra rounds of jump rope in exchange for a second helping of desserts or other food that she really likes.

	Clara, now 13, was forced to undergo a makeover for health reasons. Before and after photos show the results.

But since the physical exercise isn’t supposed to be punishment, Malou strives to make her daughter’s regimen fun. Because the treadmill bores Clara, there is the jump rope and aerobics at home. As often as they can, mother and daughter also head for the U.P. Diliman on Saturdays, doing three rounds of walking around the academic oval or playing soccer at the Sunken Garden.

On a recent Saturday morning, they make it to U.P., where Clara tries frisbee for the first time. She likes it, but says soccer still rules. Then she and Malou do their usual three rounds of walking, although the last round is interrupted by the ringing of a sorbetero’s bell. Clara has done well, and for that, her mother tells the ice-cream man to give her a scoop on an unsweetened cone.

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