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On health clubs for children.
Playtime at the Health Club
By MIREYA NAVARRO
LOS ANGELES
AT 13, Jena Jerve has managed to stretch her days to do it all: keep a 4.0 grade-point average, play center on her school's basketball team and nourish her love for dancing with six hours a week of tap, ballet and jazz.
But over the last year and a half Jena has also been cramming a less typical extra-curricular activity into her busy schedule, the health club. There, for about an hour twice a week, she has discovered the rigors of weight training and the joy of building stamina on a stationary bike and fitting into jeans. "I've lost inches around my stomach and waist and legs," said Jenna, who is 5-foot-9 and weighs about 175 pounds. "I have a lot of energy now."
With health statistics pointing at an increasingly obese population, the national preoccupation with weight is leading the parents of teenagers and even younger children to sign them up at gyms tailored to them, hire personal trainers and schedule workouts as they do piano lessons.
For the Xbox and iPod generations, unstructured play in the fresh air has become more and more a thing of the past, parents and fitness experts say. Hide and seek? Riding a bike to school? Many children now pedal only indoors in front of a racing game on a video screen.
Although there are critics who dismiss the trend as unnecessary, or as an overindulgence of the affluent, many parents say they have reason to buy - sometimes at adult-like prices - health-club memberships for their children.
"When we were kids, my friends and I disappeared for the day" to play, said Rhonda Horowitz, a real estate appraiser in Northridge, Calif., who has hired a personal trainer to work with her 14-year-old son, Craig, whose weight hovers around 200. "In this day and age you can't do that. You make play dates."
The fitness industry has been tapping into the children's market in earnest over the last couple of years. Fitwize 4 Kids, a gym for children 6 to 15 where workouts are rewarded with apples and bananas and include play like jumping rope, spun off 14 franchises last year nationwide. It charges $50 to $125 a month, and plans to open dozens more.
The International Health, Racquet & Sportsclub Association says children are the second-fastest-growing market for health clubs after baby boomers over 55. Nearly one third of its 5,000 member clubs offer a children's component, the association said, and more than 4.6 million American children between 6 and 17 hold memberships with health clubs, compared with 3.2 million in 2000.
Increased attention to what is often called an epidemic' of overweight children - 16 percent, or more than nine million children and adolescents, ages 6 to 19, are overweight - means the pressure is on for the junior set to join the battle of the bulge, most often at the prodding of Mom or Dad. Some parents note there has been a cultural change in aesthetics over time so that yesterday's desirable cute cherubs, they say, have become today's fatties.
"I'm 50, and when I was growing up, all of us were considered normal, even if the kid was husky," said Helen Cordes, editor of Daughters, a national magazine for parents of girls. "By today's standards we'd all have to go on a diet."
Many families are now walking a fine line between real and unnecessary worry. Jena's mother, Mary Baldwin, 46, said that despite all the exercise from dance and basketball, her daughter put on extra weight because of a combination of genetic makeup and meals on the fly. "I can't pretend we don't eat our share of fast food because of scheduling," said Ms. Baldwin, a nanny in Novato, in the San Francisco Bay Area.
When Ms. Baldwin first suggested that her daughter join a gym a few years ago, Jena was not interested.
"The last thing you want is to send her into bulimia," Ms. Baldwin said.
But as Jena got older she became more self-conscious and by fourth grade was facing teasing in school about her weight, Ms. Baldwin said. A year and a half ago, by the end of fifth grade, Jena agreed to start her workouts at a Fitwize 4 Kids gym. "I'm not looking for the new Miss USA," Ms. Baldwin said. "For us it's about maintaining health."
Officials with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, who have raised the alarm about childhood obesity, say health is the main reason for concern, not appearance. Although teasing or social shunning may be what overweight children first notice, they are also susceptible to adult diseases like Type 2 diabetes and, some studies suggest, may face shorter life spans than their parents because of the onset of illness at younger ages.
The fitness industry has responded not only with new health club chains, but with high-tech exercise equipment modified for children, with workout DVD's and children's programs in adult gyms for those who want to lose weight and those who want to enhance sports performance. Training with weights is safe, those in the industry say, as long as it is supervised by a professional.
ON Tuesday evening Craig Horowitz, a 14-year-old with glasses and braces, stood out among the bodybuilders, tattooed musclemen and a few well-toned women pumping iron at Gold's Gym in Northridge. Working with eight-pound dumbbells under the supervision of Taylor Kevin Isaacs, his personal trainer, Craig pursed his lips, stuck out his tongue and broke out in a sweat as he worked through an hour of stretching, strength training and cardio exercises that ended with a few minutes of soccer outside.
Mr. Isaacs said fun and play must be incorporated into workouts to keep young clients interested. He uses child-friendly lingo, "tricep skull crusher" for the tricep overhead dumbbell extension, for instance, and is careful not to hurt feelings. "You can't use the word 'wrong,' " he said, as in "You're doing the exercise wrong."
But at $100 an hour for each personal training session (including nutrition and health evaluations), there is also pressure on Craig to get serious. He has seen Mr. Isaacs on and off since he was 11, along with his father, Ben Horowitz, and mother, Rhonda, who said she realized she needed to focus on her family's diet when she hit 255 pounds herself.
Craig recently committed to three sessions a week and to the goal of dropping one to two pounds a week. He has another goal: making it onto his school's baseball team. For that, however, he must also wean himself from the junk food that has kept his weight in the 200-pound range.
"I go to parties, and they have the food - chips, hot dogs - and then you just want to overindulge," Craig, who is 5-foot-5, explained. "I feel that I can do it," he said of dropping the extra weight, "but it's hard at some points."
Some critics, even within the fitness industry, bemoan the idea that it has come to children working with personal trainers and having their own health clubs. Ron Clark, chief executive of the National Federation of Professional Trainers, which certifies trainers, said children would be better served by pursuing sports and physical activity they naturally enjoy. Mr. Clark said parents are often too eager to pay someone to teach eating and exercise habits they should foster at home.
"They're just handing off the responsibility of telling their child don't eat that Snickers bar every day," he said.
Dr. William Dietz, director of the C.D.C. division of nutrition and physical activity, said it is too soon to tell whether children's health clubs are part of the long-term answer. "If kids get bored, that may have an adverse effect on the next thing they try to do," he said.
"It's too easy to focus on the physical activity side," Dr. Dietz added. "Let's not neglect the other kind of environmental changes that would help parents that can't afford $1,000 a year for a club membership."
Many parents, however, say that they face an environment that works against their best intentions. Even if a parent feeds a child organic edamame as a snack and worries about weight the way others worry about a speech delay (or, as the Tea Leoni character did in "Spanglish," buys her daughter clothes one size too small to motivate her to lose weight), idealism soon clashes with reality.
"They have family dinners, but they have little control over what their kids are eating during the day," said Dr. Michel Cohen, a pediatrician in New York. "Most parents start out with very high ideals but by the time the kids get to be 7 or 9, it all goes down the tube because there's so much junk out there."
The highest overweight rates in children are among Mexican-Americans and African-Americans. Mr. Dietz said it is not known what accounts for the differences among ethnic groups but said it may have to do as much with socioeconomic factors as with varying cultural standards of beauty or what is acceptable weight.
Increased awareness of rising overweight rates has spurred new programs for children at Y.M.C.A.'s, Boys & Girls Clubs and local community centers, where rates tend to be more affordable for lower-income families. But at the Y, said Lynne Vaughan, a national consultant to the organization, the emphasis is still on "joyful childhood activities" like swimming and outdoor biking, rather than just fitness.
Mirackle Smith, a 9-year-old who goes to the Fitwize in Studio City five days a week after school and takes classes in kickboxing, dance and sports agility in addition to her circuit training, said she joined the gym because "my belly was big."
"I used to eat cinnamon sticks," she said. "When I go home now, I eat strawberries with Equal, and I don't eat too much."
Mirackle said she has lost more than 10 pounds since last summer but, truth be told, she said she dropped most of those during a visit to her grandmother in Jamaica.
Did Grandma have a treadmill? No, Mirackle said, "I played."
On the fact that New Orleans may become less black, more white.
In New Orleans, Smaller May Mean Whiter
By JAMES DAO
MAYOR C. RAY NAGIN of New Orleans was greeted with yowls of protest last week when he declared that it was God's will for New Orleans to be a "chocolate" city. Whites shouted racism; tourist groups threatened to cancel bookings; even his friends rolled their eyes at Mr. Nagin's penchant for saying the wrong thing at the wrong moment.
But one group, the displaced black residents of New Orleans, might have welcomed Mr. Nagin's message. The city, nearly 70 percent African-American before Hurricane Katrina, had lost some of its largest black neighborhoods to the deluge, and many fear it will never be a predominantly black city again, as it has been since the 1970's.
Indeed, race has become a subtext for just about every contentious decision the city faces: where to put FEMA trailers; which neighborhoods to rebuild; how the troubled school system should be reorganized; when elections should be held.
Many blacks see threats to their political domination in reconstruction plans that do not give them what they once had. But many whites see an opportunity to restore a broken city they fled decades ago.
In the struggle to rebuild New Orleans, could blacks find that their place in it is that much smaller?
Perhaps, demographers said. By some estimates, 300,000 people were displaced by the flood, and it is widely believed that a large majority of them were black. Though the floodwaters destroyed white neighborhoods, they were particularly devastating to the historically black areas of New Orleans East and the Ninth Ward, former swampland known collectively as "the bowl."
"There is a legitimate fear on the part of some African-Americans that it is happening," said Elliott Stonecipher, a political pollster and demographer from Shreveport, La., referring to a permanent black depopulation of New Orleans. "I don't know of a place where this kind of demographic shift has ever occurred. It is a huge, huge shift."
William H. Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution in Washington, said that New Orleans' black population has been extraordinarily rooted in the city, with many people tracing their ties to before the Civil War. Before Katrina, 88 percent of blacks in New Orleans were born in Louisiana. By comparison, just 57 percent of blacks in Atlanta were born in Georgia.
Such statistics lead Mr. Frey to believe that many displaced blacks will come home. "If the same thing happened to Las Vegas, you wouldn't have the same commitment," he said. But for many people, returning will depend on whether they see progress in reconstruction. "That's why it's important for the mayor to come up with a concrete plan for rebuilding," he said.
Paradoxically, it is a plan developed by the mayor's Bring New Orleans Back commission that is fueling concerns among some blacks that New Orleans will not emerge as a majority black city again. The commission's proposal, released two weeks ago, recommended a four-month moratorium on rebuilding in the most damaged neighborhoods to allow time for determining which should be left permanently fallow.
The proposal was greeted by a torrent of protest, led by the N.A.A.C.P. and former Mayor Marc H. Morial, a scion of one of the city's most powerful black families and president of the National Urban League.
For many blacks, the blueprint seemed to support a "smaller footprint" for the city, built mainly on higher ground. And in New Orleans, higher ground means more expensive ground, white ground, Mr. Stonecipher said.
"In the eyes of the African-Americans in New Orleans, when you say smaller footprint you are saying that inside the bowl will not be rebuilt," Mr. Stonecipher said.
Many political analysts said that the mayor's uncharacteristically impassioned speech about a "chocolate" city resulted from his recognition that his commission's proposal had infuriated many blacks.
Mr. Nagin, who is black and a Democrat, has never had strong political ties to the city's black political elite. A former Cox Communications executive, he won election with overwhelming support from white voters and business leaders, and maintained closer ties to President Bush and Louisiana Republican officials than to his own party leadership.
But he is facing re-election this year, and he cannot afford to lose too many black votes, political analysts said. Douglas Brinkley, a historian at Tulane University in New Orleans, said he believed that Mr. Nagin thought that "Chocolate City," the title of a song by Parliament, the pioneering funk band, "was a code word that would tap into getting African-American support."
Mr. Nagin is not the only politician whose fate could be determined by changes to New Orleans' population. The city has long been the backbone of Louisiana's Democratic Party, dominated by the Morial and Landrieu families. Black voter turnout there was crucial to United States Senator Mary L. Landrieu, the daughter of a former mayor of New Orleans, Moon Landrieu, in her narrow victories of 1996 and 2002.
For those reasons, some blacks see a political conspiracy in the proposals for a smaller New Orleans, analysts said. Fears about New Orleans becoming majority white have also made some black politicians wary of proposals to revamp New Orleans' schools and city government, which are widely viewed as corrupt, bloated and inefficient.
Advocates for overhauling the city government said such worries are misplaced, asserting that proposals to streamline it or fight corruption will help New Orleans win federal aid and lure back displaced residents who have witnessed better services in other cities.
"These are the types of things that have been talked about for a long time, but we just couldn't do them politically," said Barry Erwin, president of the Council for a Better Louisiana, a nonpartisan public policy group.
Though Mr. Nagin has apologized for his "chocolate" remarks, Mr. Stonecipher said they have injected some honesty into the debate over New Orleans' future, however inadvertently. A forthright discussion about race might ease tensions that are slowing reconstruction, he asserts.
"There is an absence of frankness that keeps us from having the discussion and moving on," Mr. Stonecipher said. "That's why everyone is scratching their heads saying, 'Why are we five months down the road and nothing is happening?' "
On genetic identity. And it's another Amy Harmon article. She's stalking me. Obviously.
Love You, K2a2a, Whoever You Are
By AMY HARMON
THERE are a lot of things I may never know about K2a2a, one of four founding mothers of a large chunk of today's Ashkenazi Jewish population and the one from whom - I learned last week - I am directly descended.
I may never know whether she lived 1,000 years ago or 3,000. I may never know if she was born in the Judea, as the scientists who identified her through mitochondrial DNA say they suspect. I will certainly never know her name.
I do know that I carry her distinctive genetic signature. My mother carried it, my mother's mother carried it, my daughter now carries it, too.
And the thrill of that knowledge - for the price of the $100 cheek swab test of my own DNA - may be all I can handle.
The popular embrace of DNA genealogy speaks to the rising power of genetics to shape our sense of self. By conjuring a biologically based history, the tests forge a visceral connection to our ancestors that seems to allow us to transcend our own lives.
But will our genetic identity undermine our cultural identity? The tests can add depth to what we have long believed, but they can also challenge our conception of who we are. The trauma some experience when their tests conflict with what they have always believed to be true has prompted some researchers to call for counseling to accompany the results.
Just how informative the tests are is also a matter of considerable debate.
Because the Y chromosome, which determines maleness, is passed unchanged from father to son, scientists can use it to determine whether two men share a common ancestor. When rare mutations do occur, they are unique to a single man and his male descendants, and scientists can often pinpoint when and where this founding father lived.
Mitochondrial DNA, which is passed on largely intact from mothers to their children, can be used similarly to trace maternal ancestry.
But each test can trace only one lineage back to a single ancestor. K2a2a was my mother's mother's mother's ... mother, for instance, and my father has taken the test so we can learn about his father's father's father's ... father.
But these kinds of tests can't teach me anything about any of the thousands of other ancestors of mine who were living 1,000 or 2,000 years ago.
A different kind of test, which promises to parse the percentage of a customer's genome that came from different geographical regions, can be misled by the reproductive shuffling of each generation.
Some anthropologists worry that what they call the "geneticization of identity" could lead to a dangerous view of race and ethnicity as biologically based. But many who have taken the tests say that the details of their DNA can underscore that we are all genetic cousins.
Why the genetic claiming of an ancient grandmother holds such emotional sway I am not quite sure. I mean, I've never even been to Ellis Island. And I have spent too many Christmases ordering in Chinese for it to come as a surprise that I am more likely to share mitochondrial DNA with Ashkenazi Jews than other groups.
But to judge by the growing throngs of other newly minted DNA genealogists, I'm not the only one to find appeal in the idea that the key to our past is lodged in our own genes.
On the "DNA-Genealogy" e-mail group last week, the buzz about the Jewish founding mothers was quickly supplanted by the news that scientists had traced a widely distributed genetic signature among people of Irish descent to a legendary Irish king.
"I've never felt more Irish," e-mailed Larry Slavens, a computer programmer in Des Moines whose family had immigrated from Ireland in 1740 but hadn't known of ties to Niall of the Nine Hostages, a high king of the fifth century, until last week. "I tell ya, my next tattoo is going to incorporate the Red Hand of Ulster in honor of my O'Neill kin."
Others were less impressed by the connection. "My understanding was that he was one of the nine hostages, not that he took nine hostages," wrote a disdainful John O'Connor, whose DNA links him to a different genealogical pretender to the ancient Irish throne.
Once used almost exclusively by research scientists, the tests used to cost thousands of dollars apiece. Now, thanks largely to the Human Genome Project, they are relatively cheap, and a cottage industry of commercial test companies has sprung up to take advantage of it.
By some estimates, 200,000 Americans have explored their ancestry through such ventures, which include a collaboration between the National Geographic Society, I.B.M. and Family Tree DNA of Houston whose goal is to build a database of 100,000 DNA samples from ethnic groups around the world to detail the history of human migrations. The project charges the public $99.95 to send in their DNA and find out where they fit on the resulting map.
Genetic genealogy may simply be the most recent way of fulfilling an age-old need to tell stories about our origins, anthropologists say. But because Americans put so much faith in science, our DNA results can seem more meaningful than the more standard family lore, or even years of painstaking archival research.
"DNA don't lie," said Ed Martin, 61, a retired telecommunications engineer in Orange Park, Fla., whose test put his paternal ancestors in Central Asia.
Mr. Martin had already traced his paternal line through the 1500's to a town in Germany using family records. The DNA test results, however, have persuaded him that he is descended from the Huns, who invaded an area of Germany where he still has living relatives - an area, he wrote in an e-mail message, "known as the HUNSruck."
"I spend time now visualizing what their lives may have been like, moving and attacking and conquering," he said with obvious relish. "All these groups were trying to kill the other one off. They were just brutal."
The adoption of new ancestral identities does not come so easy to everyone.
Given her previous research, Lisa B. Lee, a black systems administrator in Oakland, Calif., was sure she would find a link to Africa when she submitted her father's DNA for testing. Family lore had it that his people were from Madagascar. But after tests at three companies, the results stubbornly reported that he shared genetic ancestry with Native Americans, Chinese and Sardinians. No Africa.
"What does this mean; who am I then?" said Ms. Lee, who was active in the Black Power movement of the 1960's. "For me to have a whole half of my identity to come back and say, 'Sorry, no African here.' It doesn't even matter what the other half says. It just negates it all."
"Am I Sardinian?" she said. "Am I Chinese? Well that doesn't mean anything to me. It doesn't fit, it doesn't feel right."
DNA skeptics worry that there is a threatening side to the rise of DNA genealogy. Historically, associating human difference with genetic characteristics has had disastrous social consequences. These tests, marketed as tools to connect to a familial past, DNA skeptics say, often rely on the ability to differentiate people by the parts of our genetic makeup that correlate with racial identity.
DNAPrint Genomics in Sarasota, Fla., for instance, produces reports stating that an individual is, say, 15 percent Native American, 50 percent Western European, 10 percent African, 5 percent South Asian and 20 percent Middle Eastern.
Sandra Soo-Jin Lee, senior research scholar at the Stanford Center for Biomedical Ethics, said that history teaches the dangers of trying to define racial groups with science. "If we're going to relinquish control of our identities to science, we need to realize that we're embarking on that trajectory," she said.
When I called Dr. Karl Skorecki, one of the scientists in Israel who had tracked down K2a2a, to ask him what more he could tell me about her, he acknowledged that he finds the potential social implications of his work troubling.
"I like to confine it to what it tells us about history, and to insights about disease patterns," said Dr. Skorecki, a professor of medicine at Technion and Rambam Medical Center in Haifa. "That's different than identity. Identity is metaphysical, not physical."
So why had K2a2a's line thrived, I had wanted to know, while others had died out?
"It is rather remarkable, after having gone through plague and wars left and right, still having left a number of descendants," Dr. Skorecki said, tantalizingly. "But I think it's random."
Still, at Family Tree DNA's Web site, I paid $75 to get another test, a higher-resolution scan of my mitochondrial DNA.
Playtime at the Health Club
By MIREYA NAVARRO
LOS ANGELES
AT 13, Jena Jerve has managed to stretch her days to do it all: keep a 4.0 grade-point average, play center on her school's basketball team and nourish her love for dancing with six hours a week of tap, ballet and jazz.
But over the last year and a half Jena has also been cramming a less typical extra-curricular activity into her busy schedule, the health club. There, for about an hour twice a week, she has discovered the rigors of weight training and the joy of building stamina on a stationary bike and fitting into jeans. "I've lost inches around my stomach and waist and legs," said Jenna, who is 5-foot-9 and weighs about 175 pounds. "I have a lot of energy now."
With health statistics pointing at an increasingly obese population, the national preoccupation with weight is leading the parents of teenagers and even younger children to sign them up at gyms tailored to them, hire personal trainers and schedule workouts as they do piano lessons.
For the Xbox and iPod generations, unstructured play in the fresh air has become more and more a thing of the past, parents and fitness experts say. Hide and seek? Riding a bike to school? Many children now pedal only indoors in front of a racing game on a video screen.
Although there are critics who dismiss the trend as unnecessary, or as an overindulgence of the affluent, many parents say they have reason to buy - sometimes at adult-like prices - health-club memberships for their children.
"When we were kids, my friends and I disappeared for the day" to play, said Rhonda Horowitz, a real estate appraiser in Northridge, Calif., who has hired a personal trainer to work with her 14-year-old son, Craig, whose weight hovers around 200. "In this day and age you can't do that. You make play dates."
The fitness industry has been tapping into the children's market in earnest over the last couple of years. Fitwize 4 Kids, a gym for children 6 to 15 where workouts are rewarded with apples and bananas and include play like jumping rope, spun off 14 franchises last year nationwide. It charges $50 to $125 a month, and plans to open dozens more.
The International Health, Racquet & Sportsclub Association says children are the second-fastest-growing market for health clubs after baby boomers over 55. Nearly one third of its 5,000 member clubs offer a children's component, the association said, and more than 4.6 million American children between 6 and 17 hold memberships with health clubs, compared with 3.2 million in 2000.
Increased attention to what is often called an epidemic' of overweight children - 16 percent, or more than nine million children and adolescents, ages 6 to 19, are overweight - means the pressure is on for the junior set to join the battle of the bulge, most often at the prodding of Mom or Dad. Some parents note there has been a cultural change in aesthetics over time so that yesterday's desirable cute cherubs, they say, have become today's fatties.
"I'm 50, and when I was growing up, all of us were considered normal, even if the kid was husky," said Helen Cordes, editor of Daughters, a national magazine for parents of girls. "By today's standards we'd all have to go on a diet."
Many families are now walking a fine line between real and unnecessary worry. Jena's mother, Mary Baldwin, 46, said that despite all the exercise from dance and basketball, her daughter put on extra weight because of a combination of genetic makeup and meals on the fly. "I can't pretend we don't eat our share of fast food because of scheduling," said Ms. Baldwin, a nanny in Novato, in the San Francisco Bay Area.
When Ms. Baldwin first suggested that her daughter join a gym a few years ago, Jena was not interested.
"The last thing you want is to send her into bulimia," Ms. Baldwin said.
But as Jena got older she became more self-conscious and by fourth grade was facing teasing in school about her weight, Ms. Baldwin said. A year and a half ago, by the end of fifth grade, Jena agreed to start her workouts at a Fitwize 4 Kids gym. "I'm not looking for the new Miss USA," Ms. Baldwin said. "For us it's about maintaining health."
Officials with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, who have raised the alarm about childhood obesity, say health is the main reason for concern, not appearance. Although teasing or social shunning may be what overweight children first notice, they are also susceptible to adult diseases like Type 2 diabetes and, some studies suggest, may face shorter life spans than their parents because of the onset of illness at younger ages.
The fitness industry has responded not only with new health club chains, but with high-tech exercise equipment modified for children, with workout DVD's and children's programs in adult gyms for those who want to lose weight and those who want to enhance sports performance. Training with weights is safe, those in the industry say, as long as it is supervised by a professional.
ON Tuesday evening Craig Horowitz, a 14-year-old with glasses and braces, stood out among the bodybuilders, tattooed musclemen and a few well-toned women pumping iron at Gold's Gym in Northridge. Working with eight-pound dumbbells under the supervision of Taylor Kevin Isaacs, his personal trainer, Craig pursed his lips, stuck out his tongue and broke out in a sweat as he worked through an hour of stretching, strength training and cardio exercises that ended with a few minutes of soccer outside.
Mr. Isaacs said fun and play must be incorporated into workouts to keep young clients interested. He uses child-friendly lingo, "tricep skull crusher" for the tricep overhead dumbbell extension, for instance, and is careful not to hurt feelings. "You can't use the word 'wrong,' " he said, as in "You're doing the exercise wrong."
But at $100 an hour for each personal training session (including nutrition and health evaluations), there is also pressure on Craig to get serious. He has seen Mr. Isaacs on and off since he was 11, along with his father, Ben Horowitz, and mother, Rhonda, who said she realized she needed to focus on her family's diet when she hit 255 pounds herself.
Craig recently committed to three sessions a week and to the goal of dropping one to two pounds a week. He has another goal: making it onto his school's baseball team. For that, however, he must also wean himself from the junk food that has kept his weight in the 200-pound range.
"I go to parties, and they have the food - chips, hot dogs - and then you just want to overindulge," Craig, who is 5-foot-5, explained. "I feel that I can do it," he said of dropping the extra weight, "but it's hard at some points."
Some critics, even within the fitness industry, bemoan the idea that it has come to children working with personal trainers and having their own health clubs. Ron Clark, chief executive of the National Federation of Professional Trainers, which certifies trainers, said children would be better served by pursuing sports and physical activity they naturally enjoy. Mr. Clark said parents are often too eager to pay someone to teach eating and exercise habits they should foster at home.
"They're just handing off the responsibility of telling their child don't eat that Snickers bar every day," he said.
Dr. William Dietz, director of the C.D.C. division of nutrition and physical activity, said it is too soon to tell whether children's health clubs are part of the long-term answer. "If kids get bored, that may have an adverse effect on the next thing they try to do," he said.
"It's too easy to focus on the physical activity side," Dr. Dietz added. "Let's not neglect the other kind of environmental changes that would help parents that can't afford $1,000 a year for a club membership."
Many parents, however, say that they face an environment that works against their best intentions. Even if a parent feeds a child organic edamame as a snack and worries about weight the way others worry about a speech delay (or, as the Tea Leoni character did in "Spanglish," buys her daughter clothes one size too small to motivate her to lose weight), idealism soon clashes with reality.
"They have family dinners, but they have little control over what their kids are eating during the day," said Dr. Michel Cohen, a pediatrician in New York. "Most parents start out with very high ideals but by the time the kids get to be 7 or 9, it all goes down the tube because there's so much junk out there."
The highest overweight rates in children are among Mexican-Americans and African-Americans. Mr. Dietz said it is not known what accounts for the differences among ethnic groups but said it may have to do as much with socioeconomic factors as with varying cultural standards of beauty or what is acceptable weight.
Increased awareness of rising overweight rates has spurred new programs for children at Y.M.C.A.'s, Boys & Girls Clubs and local community centers, where rates tend to be more affordable for lower-income families. But at the Y, said Lynne Vaughan, a national consultant to the organization, the emphasis is still on "joyful childhood activities" like swimming and outdoor biking, rather than just fitness.
Mirackle Smith, a 9-year-old who goes to the Fitwize in Studio City five days a week after school and takes classes in kickboxing, dance and sports agility in addition to her circuit training, said she joined the gym because "my belly was big."
"I used to eat cinnamon sticks," she said. "When I go home now, I eat strawberries with Equal, and I don't eat too much."
Mirackle said she has lost more than 10 pounds since last summer but, truth be told, she said she dropped most of those during a visit to her grandmother in Jamaica.
Did Grandma have a treadmill? No, Mirackle said, "I played."
On the fact that New Orleans may become less black, more white.
In New Orleans, Smaller May Mean Whiter
By JAMES DAO
MAYOR C. RAY NAGIN of New Orleans was greeted with yowls of protest last week when he declared that it was God's will for New Orleans to be a "chocolate" city. Whites shouted racism; tourist groups threatened to cancel bookings; even his friends rolled their eyes at Mr. Nagin's penchant for saying the wrong thing at the wrong moment.
But one group, the displaced black residents of New Orleans, might have welcomed Mr. Nagin's message. The city, nearly 70 percent African-American before Hurricane Katrina, had lost some of its largest black neighborhoods to the deluge, and many fear it will never be a predominantly black city again, as it has been since the 1970's.
Indeed, race has become a subtext for just about every contentious decision the city faces: where to put FEMA trailers; which neighborhoods to rebuild; how the troubled school system should be reorganized; when elections should be held.
Many blacks see threats to their political domination in reconstruction plans that do not give them what they once had. But many whites see an opportunity to restore a broken city they fled decades ago.
In the struggle to rebuild New Orleans, could blacks find that their place in it is that much smaller?
Perhaps, demographers said. By some estimates, 300,000 people were displaced by the flood, and it is widely believed that a large majority of them were black. Though the floodwaters destroyed white neighborhoods, they were particularly devastating to the historically black areas of New Orleans East and the Ninth Ward, former swampland known collectively as "the bowl."
"There is a legitimate fear on the part of some African-Americans that it is happening," said Elliott Stonecipher, a political pollster and demographer from Shreveport, La., referring to a permanent black depopulation of New Orleans. "I don't know of a place where this kind of demographic shift has ever occurred. It is a huge, huge shift."
William H. Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution in Washington, said that New Orleans' black population has been extraordinarily rooted in the city, with many people tracing their ties to before the Civil War. Before Katrina, 88 percent of blacks in New Orleans were born in Louisiana. By comparison, just 57 percent of blacks in Atlanta were born in Georgia.
Such statistics lead Mr. Frey to believe that many displaced blacks will come home. "If the same thing happened to Las Vegas, you wouldn't have the same commitment," he said. But for many people, returning will depend on whether they see progress in reconstruction. "That's why it's important for the mayor to come up with a concrete plan for rebuilding," he said.
Paradoxically, it is a plan developed by the mayor's Bring New Orleans Back commission that is fueling concerns among some blacks that New Orleans will not emerge as a majority black city again. The commission's proposal, released two weeks ago, recommended a four-month moratorium on rebuilding in the most damaged neighborhoods to allow time for determining which should be left permanently fallow.
The proposal was greeted by a torrent of protest, led by the N.A.A.C.P. and former Mayor Marc H. Morial, a scion of one of the city's most powerful black families and president of the National Urban League.
For many blacks, the blueprint seemed to support a "smaller footprint" for the city, built mainly on higher ground. And in New Orleans, higher ground means more expensive ground, white ground, Mr. Stonecipher said.
"In the eyes of the African-Americans in New Orleans, when you say smaller footprint you are saying that inside the bowl will not be rebuilt," Mr. Stonecipher said.
Many political analysts said that the mayor's uncharacteristically impassioned speech about a "chocolate" city resulted from his recognition that his commission's proposal had infuriated many blacks.
Mr. Nagin, who is black and a Democrat, has never had strong political ties to the city's black political elite. A former Cox Communications executive, he won election with overwhelming support from white voters and business leaders, and maintained closer ties to President Bush and Louisiana Republican officials than to his own party leadership.
But he is facing re-election this year, and he cannot afford to lose too many black votes, political analysts said. Douglas Brinkley, a historian at Tulane University in New Orleans, said he believed that Mr. Nagin thought that "Chocolate City," the title of a song by Parliament, the pioneering funk band, "was a code word that would tap into getting African-American support."
Mr. Nagin is not the only politician whose fate could be determined by changes to New Orleans' population. The city has long been the backbone of Louisiana's Democratic Party, dominated by the Morial and Landrieu families. Black voter turnout there was crucial to United States Senator Mary L. Landrieu, the daughter of a former mayor of New Orleans, Moon Landrieu, in her narrow victories of 1996 and 2002.
For those reasons, some blacks see a political conspiracy in the proposals for a smaller New Orleans, analysts said. Fears about New Orleans becoming majority white have also made some black politicians wary of proposals to revamp New Orleans' schools and city government, which are widely viewed as corrupt, bloated and inefficient.
Advocates for overhauling the city government said such worries are misplaced, asserting that proposals to streamline it or fight corruption will help New Orleans win federal aid and lure back displaced residents who have witnessed better services in other cities.
"These are the types of things that have been talked about for a long time, but we just couldn't do them politically," said Barry Erwin, president of the Council for a Better Louisiana, a nonpartisan public policy group.
Though Mr. Nagin has apologized for his "chocolate" remarks, Mr. Stonecipher said they have injected some honesty into the debate over New Orleans' future, however inadvertently. A forthright discussion about race might ease tensions that are slowing reconstruction, he asserts.
"There is an absence of frankness that keeps us from having the discussion and moving on," Mr. Stonecipher said. "That's why everyone is scratching their heads saying, 'Why are we five months down the road and nothing is happening?' "
On genetic identity. And it's another Amy Harmon article. She's stalking me. Obviously.
Love You, K2a2a, Whoever You Are
By AMY HARMON
THERE are a lot of things I may never know about K2a2a, one of four founding mothers of a large chunk of today's Ashkenazi Jewish population and the one from whom - I learned last week - I am directly descended.
I may never know whether she lived 1,000 years ago or 3,000. I may never know if she was born in the Judea, as the scientists who identified her through mitochondrial DNA say they suspect. I will certainly never know her name.
I do know that I carry her distinctive genetic signature. My mother carried it, my mother's mother carried it, my daughter now carries it, too.
And the thrill of that knowledge - for the price of the $100 cheek swab test of my own DNA - may be all I can handle.
The popular embrace of DNA genealogy speaks to the rising power of genetics to shape our sense of self. By conjuring a biologically based history, the tests forge a visceral connection to our ancestors that seems to allow us to transcend our own lives.
But will our genetic identity undermine our cultural identity? The tests can add depth to what we have long believed, but they can also challenge our conception of who we are. The trauma some experience when their tests conflict with what they have always believed to be true has prompted some researchers to call for counseling to accompany the results.
Just how informative the tests are is also a matter of considerable debate.
Because the Y chromosome, which determines maleness, is passed unchanged from father to son, scientists can use it to determine whether two men share a common ancestor. When rare mutations do occur, they are unique to a single man and his male descendants, and scientists can often pinpoint when and where this founding father lived.
Mitochondrial DNA, which is passed on largely intact from mothers to their children, can be used similarly to trace maternal ancestry.
But each test can trace only one lineage back to a single ancestor. K2a2a was my mother's mother's mother's ... mother, for instance, and my father has taken the test so we can learn about his father's father's father's ... father.
But these kinds of tests can't teach me anything about any of the thousands of other ancestors of mine who were living 1,000 or 2,000 years ago.
A different kind of test, which promises to parse the percentage of a customer's genome that came from different geographical regions, can be misled by the reproductive shuffling of each generation.
Some anthropologists worry that what they call the "geneticization of identity" could lead to a dangerous view of race and ethnicity as biologically based. But many who have taken the tests say that the details of their DNA can underscore that we are all genetic cousins.
Why the genetic claiming of an ancient grandmother holds such emotional sway I am not quite sure. I mean, I've never even been to Ellis Island. And I have spent too many Christmases ordering in Chinese for it to come as a surprise that I am more likely to share mitochondrial DNA with Ashkenazi Jews than other groups.
But to judge by the growing throngs of other newly minted DNA genealogists, I'm not the only one to find appeal in the idea that the key to our past is lodged in our own genes.
On the "DNA-Genealogy" e-mail group last week, the buzz about the Jewish founding mothers was quickly supplanted by the news that scientists had traced a widely distributed genetic signature among people of Irish descent to a legendary Irish king.
"I've never felt more Irish," e-mailed Larry Slavens, a computer programmer in Des Moines whose family had immigrated from Ireland in 1740 but hadn't known of ties to Niall of the Nine Hostages, a high king of the fifth century, until last week. "I tell ya, my next tattoo is going to incorporate the Red Hand of Ulster in honor of my O'Neill kin."
Others were less impressed by the connection. "My understanding was that he was one of the nine hostages, not that he took nine hostages," wrote a disdainful John O'Connor, whose DNA links him to a different genealogical pretender to the ancient Irish throne.
Once used almost exclusively by research scientists, the tests used to cost thousands of dollars apiece. Now, thanks largely to the Human Genome Project, they are relatively cheap, and a cottage industry of commercial test companies has sprung up to take advantage of it.
By some estimates, 200,000 Americans have explored their ancestry through such ventures, which include a collaboration between the National Geographic Society, I.B.M. and Family Tree DNA of Houston whose goal is to build a database of 100,000 DNA samples from ethnic groups around the world to detail the history of human migrations. The project charges the public $99.95 to send in their DNA and find out where they fit on the resulting map.
Genetic genealogy may simply be the most recent way of fulfilling an age-old need to tell stories about our origins, anthropologists say. But because Americans put so much faith in science, our DNA results can seem more meaningful than the more standard family lore, or even years of painstaking archival research.
"DNA don't lie," said Ed Martin, 61, a retired telecommunications engineer in Orange Park, Fla., whose test put his paternal ancestors in Central Asia.
Mr. Martin had already traced his paternal line through the 1500's to a town in Germany using family records. The DNA test results, however, have persuaded him that he is descended from the Huns, who invaded an area of Germany where he still has living relatives - an area, he wrote in an e-mail message, "known as the HUNSruck."
"I spend time now visualizing what their lives may have been like, moving and attacking and conquering," he said with obvious relish. "All these groups were trying to kill the other one off. They were just brutal."
The adoption of new ancestral identities does not come so easy to everyone.
Given her previous research, Lisa B. Lee, a black systems administrator in Oakland, Calif., was sure she would find a link to Africa when she submitted her father's DNA for testing. Family lore had it that his people were from Madagascar. But after tests at three companies, the results stubbornly reported that he shared genetic ancestry with Native Americans, Chinese and Sardinians. No Africa.
"What does this mean; who am I then?" said Ms. Lee, who was active in the Black Power movement of the 1960's. "For me to have a whole half of my identity to come back and say, 'Sorry, no African here.' It doesn't even matter what the other half says. It just negates it all."
"Am I Sardinian?" she said. "Am I Chinese? Well that doesn't mean anything to me. It doesn't fit, it doesn't feel right."
DNA skeptics worry that there is a threatening side to the rise of DNA genealogy. Historically, associating human difference with genetic characteristics has had disastrous social consequences. These tests, marketed as tools to connect to a familial past, DNA skeptics say, often rely on the ability to differentiate people by the parts of our genetic makeup that correlate with racial identity.
DNAPrint Genomics in Sarasota, Fla., for instance, produces reports stating that an individual is, say, 15 percent Native American, 50 percent Western European, 10 percent African, 5 percent South Asian and 20 percent Middle Eastern.
Sandra Soo-Jin Lee, senior research scholar at the Stanford Center for Biomedical Ethics, said that history teaches the dangers of trying to define racial groups with science. "If we're going to relinquish control of our identities to science, we need to realize that we're embarking on that trajectory," she said.
When I called Dr. Karl Skorecki, one of the scientists in Israel who had tracked down K2a2a, to ask him what more he could tell me about her, he acknowledged that he finds the potential social implications of his work troubling.
"I like to confine it to what it tells us about history, and to insights about disease patterns," said Dr. Skorecki, a professor of medicine at Technion and Rambam Medical Center in Haifa. "That's different than identity. Identity is metaphysical, not physical."
So why had K2a2a's line thrived, I had wanted to know, while others had died out?
"It is rather remarkable, after having gone through plague and wars left and right, still having left a number of descendants," Dr. Skorecki said, tantalizingly. "But I think it's random."
Still, at Family Tree DNA's Web site, I paid $75 to get another test, a higher-resolution scan of my mitochondrial DNA.
