LOS ANGELES — A short walk from the fast-food drive-throughs, taco joints and doughnut shops lining palm-tree-dotted main drag, in Hawaiian Gardens, Calif., a classroom of energetic kindergartners begins a well-rehearsed routine.
Jutting their thumbs down and contorting their faces in theatrical frowns, the kids chant, “Soda is bad!”
“Doritos?” teacher Adriana Rosas calls out.
“No!” the kids yell, each making an “X” with their small arms.
Standing quietly to the side with his arms crossed, a short man in square-framed glasses smiles.
Alexander Khananashvili wrote these sing-alongs, which are heard in four elementary schools serving this blue-collar, predominantly Latino suburb east of Long Beach, Calif.
The tiniest city in Los Angeles County, Hawaiian Gardens would be easy to miss, but for the large electronic billboard on the 605 Freeway luring passers-by to its casino. Nearly a quarter of its population lives below the poverty level.
But to Khananashvili, the city’s size offers an unusual opportunity. He sees a condensed and manageable space to test emerging theories that suggest keeping off extra pounds requires upending everyday food culture — at schools, in grocery stores and homes, at restaurants.
“The problem with obesity can be solved,” says Khananashvili, a self-styled community educator. “It’ll take years, but it can be solved.”
It has been an unlikely journey for a physician who left Russia for an immigrant’s life in America 15 years ago and found success teaching the children of other immigrants how to improve their lives — even if that’s not always easy.
Gomez was seeking solutions to Hawaiian Gardens’ obesity problem. In a city of 14,000 residents, one in three kids was severely overweight, a rate 43 percent higher than the county average. Obese children face immediate medical problems, researchers say, as well as higher risks of heart disease, diabetes and cancer later in life.
“Unfortunately,” Gomez says, “I didn’t know how to bring it to the fore.”
Last year, Khananashvili started Activate Hawaiian Gardens — a city and school district collaboration funded by the hospital — to teach nutrition classes to kindergartners’ parents.
Since then, his program has launched healthful cooking demonstrations on the city’s cable TV channel (with guides to finding the ingredients at the local Wal-Mart), gotten children singing the praises of whole-grain bread, changed the school lunch program and prompted the local Subway shop to incorporate his diet suggestions on its sandwich menu.
He says he’s seen improvement. Roughly 45 percent of 300 kindergartners in four participating elementary schools were obese or overweight before the program began, according to a report on the project written by Gomez and Khananashvili. A year later, Khananashvili says, parents who took the class saw an almost 4 percent reduction in their children’s body mass index — a measure based on weight and height.
