When I got married my husband brought dinner into the household. Inititally, my daughter, then 11, was skeptical. Before he arrived dinner was a haphazard affair that she and I rarely ate together. I usually rushed home from work, fed her, and then ate myself after she was in bed.  

But he wasn’t having any of that.  Three or four nights a week, whenever we could manage it, he made dinner and the three of us sat down to eat it.  That’s when we talked.   

Researchers at the University of Minnesota have published several studies on how regular family meals can have a powerful affect on the healthy behavior of teenagers. Kids who sit down to dinner — or brunch or any other family meal — at least five times a week are less likely to engage in all kinds of dangerous things. Today, they report that for girls, the benefits of sharing meals with their families has staying power. Those who ate least five times a week with their families as adolescents had half the odds of drinking, smoking or using marijuana as older teenagers. 

They don’t know why it doesn’t seem to have the same affect on boys. They speculate that girls are more likely to pick up on the nuanced messages they get from adults.  I don’t know either, because I just had the one girl.  Over time she came to look forward to those dinners — the food more than the conversation. She called them “real dinners.” When she had a bad day, or was hungry, or was overwhelmed with homework, she would say, “are we having a real dinner tonight?”

Like most adolescents and teenagers, she would try to resist engaging with us. But my husband was having any of that either. He could always find a way to get her going, and before she realized it, she was hooked into a conversation. 

Now, when she comes home, dinner is a big deal. A tradition. He asks her ahead of time what she wants, and they discuss the menu in detail.  When we sit down we talk, sometimes for a long time. And it’s not at all hard to engage her anymore.

What are your family dinner traditions?

The photo of a naked man covered with tattoos flashed onto the screen. Professor Simon Rosser’s hand hovered above the computer mouse.

“Hot or not,” he asked, looking just a little sideways at me.

“Not,” I said. Click.

Up came another. A rear view of muscled butt cheeks. Simon looked at me again, his little gold earing glinting in the fluorescent light of his office.

Professor Simon Rosser

“Hot or not?”

“Hot.”

Up came another picture, the description of which is not fit for a family blog. Again, the sidelong glance, his finger poised to click.

“Hot or not?”

“NOT!” Click.

I swear he was enjoying this. What was a middle-aged heterosexual woman doing looking sexually explicit photos with a middle-aged gay man in the middle of a work day? Oh yeah, that’s right. I’m a reporter. My friend and colleague Connie Nelson, who does the Inside Out home video feature for startribune.com, always starts her snippets by explaining how she’s a huge snoop and her job gets her into some the best houses in town.

Well, I’m a snoop, too, but my job gets me into some different kinds of places altogether. The thing about snooping in new places is that you sometimes learn something about your self. Rosser, a professor at the University of Minnesota’s school of public health, spent an hour or touring me around, Sexpulse, a prototype he’s developing for a new on line HIV intervention web site for gay and bisexual men. Then he turned to me. “You notice,” he said, “you’ve been here just a bit and it’s gotten much easier to talk about sex.”

He was right. It had gotten easier. (It would be easier yet if it was just the computer and me.) And that’s his point. The HIV epidemic that is growing at a rate of 12 percent annually among young gay and bisexual men will never slow down unless we start talking about sex. That’s also true for the rising rates of all sexually transmitted diseases and teen pregnancies.

Back in the 1980’s when HIV/AIDS was at it’s peak there was a saying: “Silence equals death.” It’s just as relevant today.

Dr. Gary Remafedi, an expert on HIV and adolescent health at the university last week said, “we have to confront the realities of human sexuality. Burying our heads in the sand and pretending that people don’t have sex is not the solution.”

To read more about the web site and the growing rates of HV in gay and bisexual men, click here.

 Do you talk about sex? With your kids? With your partner? With your friends?

Dianne Neumark-Sztainer is a mom and an expert on what drives a lot of parents nuts — adolescents and their eating habits. She is a professor of epidemiology at the University of Minnesota and the lead researcher on a study published today that looks at what happens when parents of overweight kids tell them to go on a diet. They are more likely to stay fat. You can read about the study and the university’s  Project EAT project here.

She will be here on BodyTalk today to answer questions from readers about the epidemic of overweight and obesity in teenagers and what parents can do. 

She is also the author of a book called “I’m, Like, SO Fat,” which provides advice and guidance for parents on how to help their teenagers (productively) with eating and exercise in a weight obsessed world. The motto of her book she says is “Do more. Talk less.” That means you have to walk the walk you want your kids to walk. Yes, easier said than done. That gets us back to the whole do more talk less thing.

Her study published today, based on surveys of Minnesota adolescents and their parents, found that half of the parents whose kids are overweight don’t know it. That’s pretty par for the course, she says, butn itn turns out their kids might be better off. The parents who do know that their kids are too heavy often do the wrong thing by telling them to go on a diet. That tends to backfire, she found.

But she has a lot of useful, practical advice on what parents can do to help their kids.  So ask her a question, and check back this afternoon.

Sometimes the hardest thing to do as a parent is to say nothing. You can’t say “you’re too fat.” You can’t say “did you eat the whole bag?” You can’t say, “why aren’t you outside?”

But that may be the best way to help your kids lose weight or stay at a healthy weight. Mary Story, an epidemiologist at the University of Minnesota, is an expert on adolescent obesity. She and her colleagues at the university have been running a research study called Project Eat for years. They’ve been following kids from pre-adolescence through teenage-hood and into young adulthood, surveying them and their families along the way. They are getting a handle on what works and what doesn’t.

 They know that if rising adolescent obesity rates have slowed down, as researchers reported yesterday, it’s because parents had a hand in it.

  ”What drives obesity are two things. Its food. And how they are moving their bodies,” she said.  

But it’s what parents don’t say — and what they do — that’s most important, she said. Eating regular family dinners is a big help, especially for girls, they found. So is taking the TV out of their bedrooms.

Don’t focus on their weight. Don’t focus on losing weight, she said. Instead, as long as you’re the one buying the groceries, focus on buying more fruit and vegetables and less junk. As long as you are the one making meals, make the portions a little smaller.

Entice them away from the computer and the TV. Do something with them that involves moving your bodies, and do that everyday. Too much? Okay then, four or five times a week.  ”Be a role model,” Story said. 

That’s a lot harder.

 What’s worked for you and your kids? Do you have any ideas to share about how you stopped the obesity epidemic in your family?

I’m always a little flummoxed when I come across statements like the one my colleague, Katherine Kersten, wrote in her  Sunday column about the epidemic of sexually transmitted diseases:  “But few are talking about the real reason for the epidemic: too many kids are having sex at too young an age.”

It’s true. STDs are spread by sex. Kersten and other social conservatives say that the solution is to tell teenagers and young adults not to have sex until they are married. Problem solved. But this is where I get flummoxed because, obviously, that’s not working.

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