"Giving school children access to chilled selfserve water https may help chip away at childhood obesity https a new study of more than one million New York City school students suggests. The study published in JAMA Pediatrics analyzed data collected from  elementary and middle schools across New York City  some with and some without water jets. The large clear electrically cooled jugs with a push lever for fast dispensing were placed in  school cafeterias about  percent of schools during the  and the  school years. Schools with water dispensers saw a modest weight drop among students according to the study by researchers from NYU Langone Medical Center New York Universitys Institute for Education and Social Policy and the Center for Policy Research at Syracuse Universitys Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs. We associated these water dispensers with almost a one percentage point reduction in the likelihood of being overweight https for boys and a little over a half a percentage point reduction for girls said lead researcher Brian Elbel an associate professor of population health and health policy at NYU School of Medicine. Even a small straightforward relatively inexpensive policy intervention was associated with a small but statistically significant drop Elbel told CBS News. Water jets also were linked with a decrease in the amount of halfpints of milk students bought which could be a potential mechanism of weight reduction the researchers found.  Modern water dispensers may be more effective than oldfashioned water fountains since water quality and cleanliness may deter kids from using older fountains and theyre not as efficient at serving large numbers of children experts noted in an accompanying editorial. The editorial entitled Power of a Simple Intervention to Improve Student Health Just Add Water said the studys findings are significant. Sometimes a very simple intervention https can have a powerful effect wrote Lindsey Turner of Boise State University in Idaho and Erin Hager from the University of Maryland School of Medicine in Baltimore. The study by Schwartz and colleagues in this issue of JAMA Pediatrics adds to a growing body of evidence supporting the importance of providing drinking water https access in schools. In this study the findings demonstrate that water access in schools can promote healthy weight outcomes among students Turner and Hager said."