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Food & Beverage Industry

Subway celeb Jared joins fight against childhood obesity

Nation's Restaurant News, May 23, 2005 by Amy Spector

CHICAGO -- Jared Fogle may be forever known as "the Subway guy," but the young man who gained national attention for his shape-shrinking regimen of sandwiches and exercise now is putting his promotional weight behind organizations that fight childhood obesity.

Like a miner working a rich vein of ore, Fogle will use the 2005 National Restaurant Association Restaurant Hotel-Motel Show--the annual gathering of foodservice operators, manufacturers and service providers, held here--to spread his message about children's nutrition through his newly launched organization, the Jared Foundation.

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Fogle's nonprofit association, based in Indianapolis, will raise funds for groups that promote healthy lifestyles for kids, he said. His first beneficiary will be the Feed Their Dreams Children's Foundation, which is based in Providence, R.I., and is operated by culinary educator and fund-raiser Rick Tarantino and teen celebrity chef Justin Miller.

The Jared Foundation joins a crowded field of educators, chefs, public policy makers and others who have taken action to improve the dietary habits of American youth. Many people are making the dietary habits of American youth a primary concern, from Berkeley, Calif.-based culinarian Alice Waters and her 11-year-old Edible Schoolyard project to former president Bill Clinton and his recently launched 10-year partnership with Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee and the American Heart Association.

Findings released last year by the Atlanta-based Centers for Disease Control and Prevention helped to heighten alarm over the obesity rates among children. The CDC reported that nearly 16 percent of children from 6 to 19 years old were overweight, with another 15 percent at risk of becoming overweight, based on statistics drawn from 1999 to 2002.

Tarantino said his encounters with school-aged children as well as his observations of his own sons and their friends have shown him that bad dietary habits spring from many factors, including the short amount of time kids have to eat lunch at school and their lack of education about nutrition.

Legislators in 27 states have honed in on vending machines as one source of the problem and have proposed regulations on the items sold from them, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. For instance, machines were outlawed on elementary- and secondary-school campuses in Arkansas, while the California legislature has banned the sale of carbonated beverages in school vending machines.

Although restaurants have little control over school vending machines and lunch programs, Fogle, Tarantino, Clinton and others have indicated that restaurateurs could help resolve the obesity problem by educating consumers about portion sizes.

"We use the fist method," Tarantino said, meaning that he teaches kids to eat servings of proteins, such as chicken, beef or fish, that are no larger than the size of a human fist. "Kids just don't know these things," he suggested.

The American Heart Association has provided the statistics to back Tarantino's claim. In "A Nation at Risk: Obesity in the United States," the AHA's survey released in conjunction with the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, statistics showed that "on days when children eat fast food, they consume an average of 187 more calories." The handbook also noted that children tend to consume nearly twice as many calories when eating in a restaurant than when eating at home.

"Restaurants play a big role in this," Fogle said. "Portion control is a factor, and restaurants want to do what they can. They're a big national platform."

As he does at the Subway sandwich chain, Fogle at his foundation plans to use his own story to appeal to overweight kids and help them adopt healthy eating and exercise habits, while leveraging the celebrity he has gained to raise funds for like-minded charities.

The Jared Foundation is an independent charity and is not affiliated with Subway, Fogle said. Tarantino said the primary sponsors to date for the Feed Their Dreams Children's Foundation have been foodservice manufacturers.

The son of a physician, Fogle overate as an act of rebellion when he was a child, he conceded. By age 20, when he weighed 425 pounds, "My weight was negatively impacting every aspect of my life," he said. No diet plan proved effective until he picked up a nutritional brochure at a Subway franchise "next to where I lived in college" and realized he could monitor his daily intake of fat and calories. As his weight dropped, his energy increased to permit regular exercise, he explained, and by his senior year he had lost 245 pounds.

A chance meeting with an old friend, who was a reporter for the newspaper at Indiana University, Fogle's alma mater, resulted in an article about Fogle's weight loss. The article ran on the front page of the university paper, got picked up by a national news wire service and caught the eye of Subway management. Next thing he knew, "I was on Oprah," Fogle exclaimed.

Food & Beverage Industry

Subway celeb Jared joins fight against childhood obesity

Nation's Restaurant News, May 23, 2005 by Amy Spector

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