Subscribe to Common Dreams News Updates
Most Popular This Week
Popular content
Today's Top News
Healthy School Lunch Efforts Face Daunting Hurdles
LOS ANGELES - School cafeteria meals like low-fat pizzas with whole grain crust don't taste too bad to Paola Villatoro, a 17-year-old at Downtown Magnet High School in Los Angeles.
Hot food in the nutrition break mid-morning consisting of either a mini sausage roll or Vegetarian Italian bagel is pictured at Belmont High School in Los Angeles, California May 18, 2009. Los Angeles Unified School District is an anti-junk-food pioneer, but the obstacles it faces show how difficult it is to change habits shaped by decades of unhealthy eating promoted by the mammoth fast-food industry. Picture taken May 18, 2009. (Reuters/Fred Prouser) "Some of it is pretty good," she said.
But West Adams Preparatory School student Alfredo Segura doesn't like them. "It tastes like prison food," said Segura, 16, as he and other students ate snacks at a fast-food joint near the school.
Los Angeles Unified School District is an anti-junk-food pioneer, but the obstacles it faces show how difficult it is to change habits shaped by decades of unhealthy eating promoted by the mammoth fast-food industry.
The district's food services department has thrown out deep-fat fryolators, added more fresh foods and reduced sodium in cafeteria meals. It also has outlawed sugary sodas and banished junk food vending machines on campus.
But enforcement has been spotty and fast-food chains and convenience stores wait outside school gates, eager to provide students with a fix.
Even though she likes some of the school meals, Villatoro joins friends for weekly lunches at a fast-food outlet across from the school.
The number of U.S. fast-food restaurants exploded to about 220,000 in 2001 from 30,000 in 1970. And over the last three decades, spending on fast food hit $110 billion from $6 billion, according the public-health focused nonprofit Trust for America's Health and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.
As working parents turned to restaurants for cheap super-sized meals, the eating habits of adults and children alike changed and waistbands expanded.
At the same time, schools dropped recess and physical education classes that used to burn off calories, to carve out more time for lessons.
Obesity rates for school-age children have tripled to 17 percent since 1980. At that rate, there is an "epidemic in the United States," according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Experts worry about soaring rates of diabetes, heart disease and other chronic conditions as these children grow up, further adding to the country's health crisis.
In Los Angeles County 23 percent of school children were obese and another 19 percent were overweight in 2007, the county's health department said.
OUTDATED NUTRITIONAL STANDARDS
The U.S. government spends about $11.7 billion a year on school programs that provide lunch for over 30 million children and breakfast for more than 10 million -- but has not updated nutritional standards and meal requirements since 1995.
States have tried to act without waiting for the federal government. As of last August, 18 states had adopted tougher nutritional standards than the U.S. government -- but most lack enforcement power and cannot punish noncompliance, says the Trust for America's Health, a nonprofit organization that works to raise community health standards.
Recent data suggests that childhood obesity rates may be leveling off. Some experts say programs like healthier school lunches are starting to work, but others are skeptical.
President Barack Obama wants to increase funding for U.S. child nutrition programs by $1 billion per year to prevent children from going hungry in a recession that has sent unemployment to a 25-year high.
"We're hoping it comes our way," said Laura Benavidez, deputy director of the Food Services Department for the Los Angeles school district with 690,000 students.
Its food services budget of $325 million this year covers not only meals, but also staff salaries, benefits, insurance utilities and utensils. It spends about 70 cents per meal, excluding milk, which costs 18 to 20 cents per serving. The district currently loses money on every lunch it serves.
At Castelar Elementary in Los Angeles' Chinatown section recently, students rushed a salad bar, scooping up orange slices and half bananas, green peas and salad -- a fair portion of which actually went into stomachs instead of trash cans.
Still, the healthy message is often undermined by school fund-raising events where selling junk food raises money for sports teams or academic clubs.
"We can't undo a lot of habits," said Dennis Barrett, who oversees the district's food services operations.
In the battle between veggies and burgers, burgers may be hard to beat.
(With additional reporting by Chuck Abbott in Washington, editing by Alan Elsner)
27 Comments so far
Show AllIn most states you cannot operate a bar or a strip club within a certain number of feet of a school. Why not include unhealthy retail outlets (fast food, drugs, cigarettes, etc.) in the ban?
No point. Kids are just going to get the unhealthy stuff elsewhere, after school, at home, buying it before school and bringing it with them, etc.
If you want kids to eat healthily and well, you need to teach them to do so, and how to do so. If you want them to exercise and play sport, you need to get them to get them to love doing so. You need to teach them how to think about diet and exercise, how to balance healthy foods, unhealthy foods and exercise. Eating healthily doesn't necessarily mean that you never ever eat the unhealthy stuff.
Diet is a 24 / 7 issue. Food for many people is a very important issue, and goes far beyond simply providing essential nutrients. Force and regulation rarely ever work longterm when trying to get someone to eat healthily and exercise regularly. It is why most extreme diets, regardless of how healthy they might be, rarely ever work for most people.
Fine, but unless the school HAS healthy choices, junk food is the only thing they'll get at school, and if healthful lunches are all that's available at school, the kids WILL get at least THAT much nutrition.
Art: the most dangerous gateway drug of all. Go cold turkey or turn in your parents at
http://www.geocities.com/Hollywood/Trailer/8989
We can ALL live without ART!
Tragically, too many people live to eat; the healthiest among us eat to live.
Eating may be the only pleasure which we can assure ourselves. All one needs is the ability to procure food (i.e. an income).
Sex at least requires another person; I don't consider masturbation to be sex any more than junk food to be nutrition.
One of the first things that new vegetarians learn is how to enhance flavor in their diet without increasing sodium to unhealthy levels. Even so, it's not easy to mimic the mouth's response to an abundance of spicy animal fat.
Fast food is sensory titillation. We may need to start treating poor dietary habits in the same way that we cure drug addiction.
q
There is nothing wrong with loving to eat food, for taste.
The key is learning how to balance healthy foods, unhealthy foods, food for nutrients, food for taste, and exercise.
The key is discovering healthy good foods that tastes good.
The key is discovering that highly processed industrialised food not only is robbed of nutrients; highly processed industrialised food is also robbed of TASTE. For example, raw milk tastes MUCH better than pasteurised, homogenised milk. Cheese made from raw milk, in most cases, tastes MUCH better than cheese made from pasteurised milk.
Kids need to be taught to think about food. Because of how important food is in many many cultures, and how important it is to many many people, treating poor dietary habits like drug addiction achieves nothing long term.
Also, while I am generalising here, physical activity is a very important "cheat", for those who want to eat "unhealthy" foods. You want that bic mac, and fries and milkshake? Sure. Do it after playing a couple hours of pickup basketball. Or some intense physical work.
Another example: long distance athletes, whether cyclists, runners or swimmers, consume HUGE amount of calories. Michael Phelps for example, when he was training for the Olympics, ate in one day, the amount of "unhealthy" foods that a typical overweight American might eat in 3-4 days.
Wow. A paid representative of the fast-food industry couldn't have done a better job of trying to mitigate the arguments made in this thread.
There is no need to balance healthy food with unhealthy foods; people simply need to eat good foods to help maintain good health throughout their lives.
Poor dietary habits MUST be treated as a drug addiction in the most important aspect of reform; the person needs to stop ALL consumption of the addictive substance, whether heroin or Ding Dongs. A good cleansing fast - especially under the supervision of an expert - is an excellent way to begin new eating habits.
Also, trying to base arguments about the diets of ordinary people on the eating habits of world-class competition athletes - a very tiny fraction of the overall population - is ridiculous.
I'm 60 years old and each of my dance sessions is two solid hours of strenuous head-to-toe physical exertion. I know firsthand the importance of provding enough calories to sustain exercise and I do so without eating "unhealthy" foods.
q
Right. Because you, or me, don't have a problem with eating healthily, everyone can do it.
"Also, trying to base arguments about the diets of ordinary people on the eating habits of world-class competition athletes - a very tiny fraction of the overall population - is ridiculous."
You have missed my point. My point is that there is more to being healthy than simply diet. You can eat the healthiest diet in the freaking world, and if you are eating too many calories, it would STILL be an unhealthy diet. You cannot decouple diet from caloric needs.
"I'm 60 years old and each of my dance sessions is two solid hours of strenuous head-to-toe physical exertion. I know firsthand the importance of provding enough calories to sustain exercise and I do so without eating "unhealthy" foods."
Again missing my point. My point isn't providing enough calories to sustain physical activity. That is hardly the problem for most people in sedentary jobs. The problem is the OPPOSITE: doing enough physical activity to use up those calories from food. The point is that if someone wants to eat unhealthy foods, doing more physical activity balances out those unhealthy foods.
"There is no need to balance healthy food with unhealthy foods; people simply need to eat good foods to help maintain good health throughout their lives."
And if people won't? Are you going to start banning this, and legislating that? And believe that banning foods left and right will work?
"Poor dietary habits MUST be treated as a drug addiction in the most important aspect of reform; the person needs to stop ALL consumption of the addictive substance, whether heroin or Ding Dongs. A good cleansing fast - especially under the supervision of an expert - is an excellent way to begin new eating habits."
Yes, and excellent way to begin. And how long will the person sustain the diet? A month? 6 months? A year?
Your attitude is PRECISELY the problem. Have you worked with overweight people in the real world? I have. For most people, a purist extremist diet rarely ever works. If a purist extremist crash diet would work for the person, s/he would not need "supervision of an expert". Most people cannot sustain those diets over a lifetime. Especially not if you have them go on a crash diet, where they stop ALL consumption of their favourite foods. It rarely takes long before they decide that they cannot do it. WTF do you do then? Jail them? WTF do you think so many people are overweight?
The problem is PRECISELY attitudes like yours. All or nothing. Your attitude just leads to people yo yoing on and off your purist crash diets and feeling miserable about themselves, with the result that they believe that they cannot live healthily while having pleasure at the same time.
And fasting is grossly overrated. Way too often it leads to people just craving their favourite foods even more, and leads to yo yo binge behaviour. Similar with crash diets.
Your entire argument is based on the premises that people don't want to eat a healthy diet and that exercise completely eliminates the harmful effects of unhealthy eating. You are simply wrong and the humorous video at this link (http://dustinmaherfitness.com/index.php/2009/05/20/can-you-out-exercise-a-poor-diet/comment-page-1/) shows why. As the man says, you cannot out-train a bad diet.
What happens when people don't eat a heathful diet? They suffer from poor health.
Your disingenuousness knows no bounds. Your attempt to equate a healthful diet as a "purist extremist (sic) diet" is shameful. I eat all kinds of dishes that would seem to be unhealthy but I've learned to prepare healthful versions of them - including pizza.
Work with overweight people? I weighed 230 pounds when I discovered the benefits of a heath-supporting, vegetable-based diet. My current weight is 160 pounds on a six-foot frame.
If you're eating too many calories then you are not eating a healthy diet. Period. If your caloric intake is limited but still made up of unhealthy foods then you will be unhealthy.
Using a young athlete as the paragon of physical health is misleading. The worst effects of poor eating show up later in life.
q
"Your entire argument is based on the premises that people don't want to eat a healthy diet and that exercise completely eliminates the harmful effects of unhealthy eating. You are simply wrong and the humorous video at this link (http://dustinmaherfitness.com/index.php/2009/05/20/can-you-out-exercise-...) shows why. As the man says, you cannot out-train a bad diet."
No my entire argument is not based on the premise that exercise completely eliminates the harmful effects of unhealthy eating. Read again.
"Your disingenuousness knows no bounds. Your attempt to equate a healthful diet as a "purist extremist (sic) diet" is shameful. I eat all kinds of dishes that would seem to be unhealthy but I've learned to prepare healthful versions of them - including pizza."
Read your post again. You want to treat people as drug addicts and have them fast, then go on a diet eliminating ALL their addictions at once.
That is not a purist extremist diet? YOUR disingenuous knows no bounds.
"Work with overweight people? I weighed 230 pounds when I discovered the benefits of a heath-supporting, vegetable-based diet. My current weight is 160 pounds on a six-foot frame."
Yes. One person. Because you can do it, so everyone can also do it. And what if someone does not want to follow your recommendation of treating them as drug addicts and having them go on a crash diet whereby they eliminate all their favourite foods at once? What do you do? Jail them?
"If you're eating too many calories then you are not eating a healthy diet. Period. If your caloric intake is limited but still made up of unhealthy foods then you will be unhealthy."
Well yes, too many calories is not a healthy diet. But most people don't know this. Most have been brainwashed into the concept of healthy FOODs. And that they can eat as much healthy foods as they want. And caloric intake vs caloric expenditure and physical activity plays immense roles no matter how much people want to downplay them by focusing on healthy foods.
"Using a young athlete as the paragon of physical health is misleading. The worst effects of poor eating show up later in life."
Yes, because that is the point of my posts. You accuse me of being disingenuous?
Since you appear to have trouble with reading comprehension, a simplification for you:
What if someone does not want to follow your recommendation of treating them as drug addicts and having them go on a crash diet whereby they eliminate all their favourite foods at once? What do you do? Jail them? What do you do with someone like Alfredo Segura? Throw him in prison?
I trust the intelligence of the folks who visit this site to look back over your previous posts and see for themselves that you're trying to change your arguments.
As to your "simplified" point, no one can force a person to eat anything - good or bad - in a free society. You apparently believe that some governing entity should do so.
Other posters here have pointed out that the best approach to good nutrition is to teach children to eat well when they're small.
My point about my own experience is that anyone can do as I did. I am no paragon of self discipline; if I can control my diet - which is not a crash diet by any means - then anyone can.
What do I do if someone doesn't want to eat a healthy diet? Personally, I usually avoid them because I'm not wild about being around slobs.
What role should the government have in enforcing good eating by citizens? Absolutely none. If people suffer poor health because they eat badly (and drink and smoke, etc.) then it's their problem.
It is the government's responsibility to see to it that its citizens have the best information available, regarding diet or any other subject of universal interest. All that you can do with young Mr. Segura is teach him the basics of good eating and, if you dine with him, set a good example. If he ignores you then there is nothing more that you can do. As I have stated already, people make their own choices in a free society and no strategy for inspiring healthful eating is guaranteed to work.
I can tell you this about Mr. Segura, however. His attitude about eating is more reflective of your thinking than of mine.
q
Schools need kitchens and on site cooks to prepare healthy meals. I don't care if it is whole wheat and low fat, if it comes from an outside contractor, chances it will be stale and skimpy. Salads shipped in? Forget about it.
What's wrong with meals based on baked potatoes, brown rice, fruits, broiled fish, roasted meats, nicely seasoned steamed vegetables? Even burgers are OK as part of a meal. I never had a kid turn down grilled cheese and tomato on whole wheat. It just has to be prepared right. A good home cook can make healthy food attractive to kids.
And it needn't be more costly than contracted foods. Just takes will, attention and organization.
Joe
The excito-toxins in fast food and most other processed food (like MSG and its other infamous names to mention just one of the oldest flavor enhancers) create this 'titillation' of the mouth. These kids are literally chemically addicted to this food and I agree with q that this should be dealt with much like a drug addiction. Wean them off.
"All one needs is the ability to procure food (i.e. an income)."
I have to disagree; we all can GROW (rather than buy) at least some of own food with little to no money required; even on the patio of an apartment building one can grow beans and cucumbers up lattice, lettuce and spinach in one pot; tomatoes and carrots in another, potatoes can be grown vertically in a basket with compost & straw...
Growing food needs be promoted in our schools!! Not only does it supplement the food being purchased it can blend with school curriculum (science as just one). Food grown by a child’s own effort may even taste a little better! Pride and a sense of self worth are amazing cures.
To grow food, you need land. Land costs money.
On your other points, I agree with you. Every school should have gardens for the students to manage themselves. After all, it's not like they're using the space for physical education.
However, none of these reforms will ever be implemented in 90% of our schools thanks to the chokehold that regional and national corporations have over school boards and they're budgets. As with every other level of governance in the US, local school boards are machanisms for pouring local tax money into the coffers of local businessmen who don't give a rat's ass about the well being of the children in the community.
q
How do you wean them off? Especially since it isn't just kids who do not eat healthily. Hell, many doctors do not eat healthily, or are overweight.
The role of food in the lives of most cultures, most societies, in the lives of most people, is hugely different than the role of drugs.
Also, glutamine / glutamate is present naturally in many foods: cheeses, tomatoes, just for 2 examples.
The "glutamine / glutamate" taste, is one of the prime taste sensations, just like sweetness or sourness.
Trying to equate MSG - a salt of the amino acid - with glutamate itself is, again, disingenuous.
q
I'm not trying to equate it. I am pointing out that it stimulates one of the fundamental taste sensations. MSG is derived from foods high in glutamine.
I think the role of food, in the United States at least, is quite similar to the role of drugs. It is used by parents to reward their kids and to comfort themselves. Unfortunately, the foods they choose often barely qualify as food! Agri-business and food manufacturers have convinced the majority that healthy food is not tasty or desirable. It's a scam that a lot of people have fallen for. I'm usually disgusted by what I see in people's carts at the grocery store, especially if they have children with them.
They can be weaned from these bad habits, but there has to be the will to do so. As you say, it has to start with the adults who are making these decisions and the schools that are feeding the kids during the day. It can't be a "crash diet", it has to be a life-long commitment to nourishment rather than immediate gratification. Healthy food can be delicious too, as someone else noted, as long as it's fresh and well-prepared. School gardens have proven very effective in getting kids interested in eating fresh food.
Bon appetit!
I think most of the comments here overlook the debilitating, eviscerating power that corporate food and its profit-driven values have permeated our culture. There is no single point in the food chain that is not polluted by deeply embedded values and policy.
I read people arguing back and forth about how to eat healthy. . . and most comments seem very narrowly focussed on individuals and I have not seen any comment addressing the corrosive power of cultural-brain-washing and the drip-drip-drip effect of seeing commercials selling us chemical-laden Hamburger Helper and sugar-laden crappola packaged in a box and presented as food (think Cheerios, even one of the good guys is crap food). . .
To expect some kid in the first grade to stand up to an overwhelming drip-drip-drip of greed and marketing and make good choices. . .
a lot of gobbledegook has been shared and I am writing gobbledegook because I am also corroded by the way all kinds of cultural habits have been infected by mostly white men sitting in offices trying to figure out how to squeeze money from the American consumder. We have a food system that for years has been focussed only on making money for shareholders and now we have a food system that makes money for shareholders but is not focussed on health and we expect a kid in the school cafeteria to stand up to that force . . .
not to mention a kid in the third grade does not have health problems, yet, related to eatingt chemical crap manufactured food stuff. . . and that kid has little ability to imagine himself with health problems in the far off future because he ate potato chips at lunch. . . .
we have to stop passing off crap as food and stop subsidizing crap with our tax dollars and stop paying farmers not to farm and making it more "Profitable" to manufacture crap than to see real whole food to real humans.
the problem is enormously complex and cannot be solved in school cafeterias.
Tree Fitz: Good analysis of how the structure takes a lot of options away from the the individual. It is similar to living ecologically. How can we overcome the need to drive cars when for the last 60 years the whole country is built up around suburbs and highways? Not easy.
Still, within all that we can try. Some few have the land, climate, seed money, time and skill to grow part of their own food supply and people are doing that. We can be conscious and make demands on stores and schools. After all, money still rules and each of us has a little bit of it to spend or withhold with discretion when we buy food. The food industry is at the mercy, ultimately, of the choices by families and thus is one of the most vulnerable to bottom up pressure.
And I keep saying this everywhere - the biggest problem is institutional contracts, in this case for food delivery. That just about guarantees the products will be stale and poorly made. The only thing that will become healthy from this are the fortunes of the contractors and the politicians who serve them.
Food should be made by loving cooks in kitchens on site. It used to be that way in the schools and day care centers in NY. It varied somewhat, but a lot of the food was good, better than stuff shipped in and microwaved.
Joe
If the whole wheat pizza tastes like prison food, it isn't well made. My home made whole wheat pizza tastes better than commercial pizza. Like pie crust, pizza crust is one of the places a whole grain improves the product. Institutional cooking can be bad.
Art: the most dangerous gateway drug of all. Go cold turkey or turn in your parents at
http://www.geocities.com/Hollywood/Trailer/8989
We can ALL live without ART!
When my son was in high school decades ago, I asked the home economics teacher how much time they spent on teaching "nutritian". His response was that it took all of his time just to teach the basics of cooking and he didn't have time to teach nutritian. Therein lies the problem. NOBODY teaches, and very few understand nutritial requirements today. Doctors do not learn nutritian. Many school systems have eliminated the Nutritionist from the school lunch staff as a cost saving measure. Some schools have taken to buying pre-packaged frozen foods to serve rather than have a full kitchen staff which cooks on site. I do not believe the solution to be limiting the placement of fast food establishments, but rather it should be to start young and educate our youth in the proper way to nurish and exercise the body for a healthy life style. That said, I tend to agree with quickstepper, to wit, corporations (eg. dairy, beef and pork industries), have undue influence over the FDA which in turn gives unhealthy advice to our schools and to the public in general
In this kind of situation, if you don't have the PTA on your side, you'll never change anything. If you do, you can make serious changes, even if parents have to volunteer to do some food prep. Then you'd win over the kitchen staff when they saw parents giving their time to provide children quality food. The cost of change is sometimes prohibitive. Parents have to be on board and committed to follow through at home. If they're not, you'll rarely make a real change in children's long term behavior and people won't be willing to make the investment.
Eat real food
Not too much
Mostly vegetables
Start kids eating right early in their life
Before Con Agra poisons them in mind and body.
Quickstepper makes some good points above, but I can't agree with his/her assumption that the USA is a free society.
How can a society of mostly propaganda-hypnotized, history illiterate, solipsism-strutting,and increasingly neurologically-poisoned citizens be free?
Free to do and be what? Herd-like Lemmings following each other en masse over a cliff?
Our vaunted American corporate-capitalist, pseudo democratic system has unleashed on most of the world's people a suicidal life model: a way of individually Seeing and collectively Being that guarantees the poisoning humanity's air, land, water, food and its higher cognitive and spiritual capacities to boot --- all in the name of momentary riches for the worst of our fellows.
If we call ourselves a free, we are in error.
amen, Terry a, you say it well.
We aren't a free society. And it is ludicrous to expect kids to overcome these crap in the daily food choices without tons of help from the adults in their lives and all kinds of reinforcement that we just aren't set up in this culture to provide. Kids are sources of profit for the corporate-capitalist, pseudo democratic system and the profit they can offer the people who want the profit matters more than, um, the underlying kid matters. If that sounds cold, well, that's the way it is.
Diet is one area of our lives where we have some measure of control. I agree that the mainstream diet, sold by the mainstream media is atrocious, but come on folks. There is plenty of whole food available from a variety of sources and anyone who is reasonably intelligent can figure out how to put together a healthy diet. It doesn't have to be expensive either, if you don't have to have the "convenience" foods.
It saddens me that so many people just throw in the towel and blame it on "the system."
Teach your children.
Turn off the TV.
Cuba does it...and for free! So what is the big deal? I guess the deal would not be big enough for the junk food producers.