It’s been a long day for Deborah Service.

At 5:30 p.m. Monday evening, she has just picked up her 18-month-old son, Karsyn, from day care after getting off work at a financial firm in Liverpool, N.Y. Now, she wants to get dinner on the table.

‘Tonight, I’m planning on not cooking,’ Service said in a Tops supermarket parking lot, strapping Karsyn into his car seat.

She loads a few plastic grocery bags into the backseat of her sedan. She picked up a rotisserie chicken for dinner.

Service cooks dinner about three days a week. The rest of the time, she buys a premade meal on the way home. She worries the packaged meals aren’t quite as healthy as the ones she cooks. But when she’s pressed for time, convenience comes first.

Working parents like Service are the target of a health campaign by four senior public relations students at Syracuse University:David Lurie, Thomas Millas, Jessica Engel and Christopher Jennison.Their goal is to encourage healthy eating to prevent the risk of obesity in children.

The issue of childhood obesity has taken center stage in the news in the past few years, illuminated by first lady Michelle Obama and the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Childhood obesity has tripled in the past 30 years, according to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention.

The four seniors wanted to encourage the Syracuse community to act on the rising health risks and are working to bring the issue to light.

The campaign is a bid in a contest organized by the Public Relations Society of America. The contest, called the Bateman Competition, is the most prestigious one available for public relations students, said the group’s faculty adviser and public relations professor Robert Kucharavy. He suggested the students enter this year’s competition.

The PRSA awards $2,500 to the first-place team in the contest, open to public relations students nationwide. This year’s topic is tackling childhood obesity.

‘Awareness is easy,’ Kucharavy said. ‘The hard part is getting somebody to actually do something.’

Parents are the ones who have the power in the checkout line at supermarkets, the group members said. So to motivate parents to pick up healthier foods, they partnered with Tops supermarkets at three Syracuse-area locations: in the Shop City and Westvale plazas, and on Nottingham Road.

At the markets last week, they handed out 400 wallets filled with mock $20 bills. Some bills added up potential health costs associated with obesity, including treatments and procedures for diabetes and heart disease. Others listed a healthy eating pledge for parents and children to sign.

The students’ money-printed pamphlets list ideas for how to toss healthier foods into shopping carts and cook more wholesome meals — without spending more time in the kitchen or breaking the bank.

Cooking healthy meals can be tough for busy families, acknowledged senior David Lurie. The quickest and least costly options involve fast food, high in fat and low in nutrients.

Kucharavy said to convince families to change their regimen, the group needed to give concrete evidence for eating healthier.

‘If it’s too hard to solve the problem, they won’t do anything,’ he said.

The public relations group considered gearing the campaign toward children, but it decided against what senior Jessica Engel called a ‘ponies and gummy bears’ approach: relying solely on upbeat encouragement to get children to eat healthy.

To provide their argument, the group handed out the bills to shoppers at the grocery stores. The bills were meant to startle parents who were previously unaware of obesity’s risks into considering healthier eating options.

The group has received some criticism of the campaign. One professor told Engel that the bills adding up health costs associated with obesity could offend people who are obese, Engel said. But getting a strong reaction was the point.

Evidence about the effectiveness of curbing childhood obesity campaigns is just starting to emerge, said Leigh Gantner, a public health expert and a professor of nutrition at SU.

‘What seems to work is when you involve the whole family in exercise and healthy eating instead of asking obese children to make a healthy salad while the leaner brothers and sisters get KFC,’ she said.

When Service is trying to get home after work, she’s not looking for tips on buying and cooking healthy meals. She said she would gladly accept handouts with the information on the weekends, when she’s less pressed for time.

The most important thing for the group is that its message gets through.

‘It’s not something we can put on the back burner and worry about later. It’s here now,’ Engel said. ‘And it’s affecting kids’ futures.’

abknox@syr.edu

Published on March 5, 2012 at 12:00 pm