Study: Kids Will Eat Healthy School Food
Maybe getting schoolchildren to eat healthy foods isn’t a hopeless struggle.Bucking some common notions, a University of Minnesota study has found that school lunch sales don’t decline when healthier meals are served, and that more nutritious lunches don’t necessarily cost schools more to produce.
“The conventional wisdom that you can’t serve healthier meals because kids won’t eat them is false,” said Benjamin Senauer, one of three economists who wrote the study.
Previous studies have concluded that students prefer fatty foods and that healthier meals cost more to make, the authors noted.
The study, which appears in the December issue of the Review of Agricultural Economics, analyzed five years of data for 330 Minnesota public school districts. It looked at compliance with federal standards for calories, nutrients and fats.
When the researchers crunched all the numbers they found that schools serving the healthiest lunches did not see a falloff in demand.
While serving better meals does entail higher labor costs, the study found, that’s offset by lower costs for more nutritious foods such as fruits and vegetables compared with processed foods. However, many districts need to upgrade their kitchens and train their staff to prepare these foods, the researchers said.
The study’s conclusions rang true for Jean Ronnei, director of nutrition services for St. Paul Public Schools, which serves more than 46,000 meals daily. The district was held up by the authors as a model for others.
Ronnei said the percentage of St. Paul kids eating school lunches has increased in recent years at the same time the district has been offering more fruits and vegetables.
“That doesn’t mean we don’t have a hot dog on our menu. We do. … In our case it’s a turkey low-fat hot dog,” she said.
Margo Wootan, director of nutrition policy at the nonprofit Center for Science in the Public Interest in Washington, said she was pleased to see evidence that schools can offer nutritious meals kids will eat without higher costs.
“I think people underestimate the willingness of kids to eat healthier foods,” she said.
The study also pointed out that school districts are allowed to charge their lunch programs for indirect costs such as electricity or janitorial services for their cafeterias. The authors said that can be abused by cash-strapped districts charging their lunch programs high overhead; they recommended tighter limits on those charges.
Dr. Sandra Hassink of Wilmington, Del., a member of the American Academy of Pediatrics’ Obesity Task Force, said that was an important finding. She said money allocated for nutritional programs should be spent on nutrition.
Alice Jo Rainville, a professor of nutrition and dietetics at Eastern Michigan University, noted that school nutrition programs have improved because of federal policy changes enacted in 2004, the last year included in the study.
Rainville said results in other states might not match those in Minnesota, but Senauer said he believes the situation is similar across the country.
“Everything we’ve done here, there’s good reason to believe it’s happening nationally,” he said.
On the Net:
National School Lunch Program: http://www.fns.usda.gov/cnd/lunch
School Nutrition Association: http://www.schoolnutrition.org/
© 2007 The Associated Press
As a coordinator of a community garden where we hold Summer Gardening Day Camps, I can attest to the fact that children will eat healthy food if provided that food, especially if the child has helped grow it. A reporter once came to the camp and was astonished at what the children were eating: vegetarian chili, fresh garden salad and watermelon. In addition to a good diet, schools need to reinstate a rigorous physical education program. Like our kids digging in the garden and walking to a local public swimming pool each day of camp, healthy children need to burn up all that energy, and in doing so, sleep well at night. The parents? Hey my kids didn’t even watch t.v. last night: just straight to bed. Ha! I have no doubts that so-called hyper children would become less so on a good diet with adequate exercise. Get them off the psychotropics. Doing away with obesity is about lifestyle and getting rid of fast foods and corn syrup laden soda pops, growth hormone beef and sweets of all kinds.
Kids will eat anything, even brock-o-lee when really hungry. The trick is, no junk snacks, loaded with sugar and salt between meal times.
Kem is right, less trips to the doctor too.
Yep, and they’ll grow up and have a good mind and a __ well formed body. ___ Nice.
Bill Maher says again and again that our high healthcare bill often results from us eating crap - and when you start eating crap young, it snowballs into health problems like diabetes, obesity and so on. So let’s start at the source.
I remember in my high school, Coca-Cola company would come and hold huge promotions every year, showing movies and giving away free Cokes. Schools should not be coddling the junk food industry, as if this industry gives a sh*t about children’s health. Junk foods and sodas should be outright banned from public schools, as many districts in the country have already done. We do the same with cigarettes and cigarette advertising at school, it’s not that radical a idea.
We’re trying this in the UK, and uptake of school meals has fallen off. Kids here are so wedded to their transfat laden junk snacks that their parents are prepared to bring them chip butties and other such delicacies at lunch time. Perhaps that is the difference - the media and parents sneer at efforts to improve kids’ diet and collude with them in insisting on “normal” form.
Garbage in garbage out.
My kids rarely take hot lunch at school. How are deep fried bread sticks a healthy choice? And the vegetable they serve are beyond disgusting. Cooking the heck out of veggies will not convert kids.
My nephew is very picky-he eats only hamburgers for meat. We had turkey at Thanksgiving and he ate a plate of chips and a bun. Yum-O. His mom is obese and his dad runs marathons and eats crap (how?). Not setting much of an example. Adults are a lot of the problem. I grew up with vegetables or fruit at every meal. My kids get the same. If we have “junk” in the house, 9 times out of 10 it is homemade cookies or cake, not processed junk.
Get gardens growing at schools, let the kids graze in them. Get phy ed as a daily requirement in the schools. If we give our kids the tools as they grow, when they are adults, they will know how to use them.
I can remember when very ,very few people ate ‘yogurt’. The answer, when asked about it, was: “you have to aquire a taste for it”. So, as a curious teenager, I bought a ‘Dannon Yogurt’, mixed the sugary fruit at the bottom of the cup, and tried it and liked it. Yeah, it tasted different than those half-gallon blocks of ice-cream I devoured along with a jar of caramel/butterscotch topping, plus the areosol can of whipped cream, and the ‘Bosco’ or Hershey’s syrup’ and the chopped nuts and the chemically laden maraschino cherry on top. Man, those were the days! Too bad my parents believed Madison Avenue. I learned the hard way.
Teach kids by example and they”ll eat wholsome food. And as you entice them, give them an elementary lesson on the health benefits of the fare. A little hyperbole goes a long way with a child, but will stimulate the desire to learn more.
Where is this “conventional wisdom” about children Senauer refutes coming from? It’s a media stereotype, like so many of our other false assumptions. We pimp junk to kids and then caricature them for eating it.
I think one source of the “conventional wisdom” comes from genetic studies which show that certain taste sensations are instinctive–namely, sweet, salty, and oily–while others (bitter, sour, spicy, “umami”) are developed over time. Nearly every baby is born with a craving for sweet, salty, and oily, but a taste for the others is largely determined by what a child eats up to age 11 or 12 (and how the food is presented, the environment in which it is eaten, etc.) That’s why many children have an aversion to green vegetables, for example. I’m a food researcher in Japan and we spend a lot of time educating parents about how to create the most positive “mealtime” environment to develop good eating habits in their children.
We gave a demonstration in our town that featured a chef from a Chicago public school that had switched to an organic lunch program that resulted in improved grades and decreased discipline problems. The parents that came loved the talk, but no one from the local schools came to learn.