Good news America, children are finally eating their vegetables! The bad news however approximately 40% of these vegetables in a kid’s diet are French Fries. School cafeterias are teaching their students that French Fries are a suitable vegetable. With each passing school lunch day, adolescents are getting fatter and fatter. Instead of providing nutritious options in the cafeteria for the growing youth, school districts sign into lucrative contracts with soda and chip companies in return of selling these snacks on campus. School board members must not know the definition of nutrition and only see dollar signs blinking in the distance. Take an Alka Seltzer to settle your stomachs, it gets worse.
But it tastes good so what is the difference?
The choices available to a child at school should not be diabetes with a side order of obesity, but rather sensible meals filled with more nutrition and less fat. According to the National School Lunch Program the average elementary school lunch has an average 738 calories. And that’s before the child grabs a Snickers from the vending machine, pushing the caloric intake past half the average daily calories. Even though taking your lunch in a brown bag/ lunch bag seems less glamorous than eating a school lunch, it is actually better for you and contains less fat; averaging 20.8 grams of fat for the sack lunch versus 31.1 grams of fat in the cafeteria lunch. The difference is a little less than 11 grams of fat, but over a week that’s almost 88 grams of fat! Calculate the amount of fat over an entire school year, the beginnings of obesity for a child.
Apparently school board leaders aren’t feeding their kids the food from school cafeterias.
It takes a combination effort of school officials, governmental funding and parents to take a stand. A child can’t speak for themselves because they are too busy stuffing their face with nutrition less lunch food, and washing it down with an ice cold sugary soda.
As for parents on the go who use fast food restaurants as a provider of meals can now be substituted by one touch microwavable meals, which are a little better for the body. A recent article on knbc.com titled “Microwave Food Can Beat Drive-Throughs” compared eating three meals a day on the go from fast food restaurants and compared it with eating readily prepared meals that are microwaveable from the grocery store. Both food options were convenient, quick and easy. In recent years the fat content of these microwaveable meals has decreased along with the lowering of milligrams of cholesterol and the amount of salt. With the decrease of fat grams has led packaged food makers actually paying attention to herbs and spices; who would have thought to put such things in food?
Our school cafeterias can do better. Simply teaching our kids the fundamentals of healthy eating is not enough; it must be put into action in the cafeterias. We teach our children the food pyramid and the necessity of fruits and vegetables, yet counter act these teachings with greasy pepperoni pizza and deep fried corn dogs being served during lunch time. With the recent development of healthier quick microwavable meals, these can be substituted for the high calorie cafeteria meals. These foods may be a little bit more expensive than the junk filled food currently being served but what is more important spending a little more money on nutritious meals or a tray of obesity?
So it's up to parents, school board leaders, cafeteria workers and government officials to fight for a well balanced meals in our schools. Let's trade those Doritos for some fabulous carrot sticks. Our children may not thank us in the beginning, but they will definitley thank us in the future.
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3 comments:
I really like the development of this piece, having seen it in the early stages. Poor dietary codes in school systems seem to boil down to a few basic components: lack of funding which causes the foods bought for the cafeterias to have lower nutritional value. I also feel that there is a great deal of ignorance surrounding the issue considering the the schools who lack most in the nutritious foods are public institutions. The parents can't step in because they are working class, the kids don't know the difference, and the school just wants to keep their students fed at whatever cost.
Some of the statistics in this piece are out of this world! I can't believe KIDS are gobbling down more than 1/3 of their daily required calories and so much fat in a single meal. Pair this with decreased recess and gym time — no wonder we're being faced with an obesity epidemic!
I am a substitute teacher at several elementary schools in Vermont — in one of the classes, the teacher has banned snacks from home. Every day, the kids are given a different "healthy" snack, like popcorn and apples or crackers with peanutbutter. The kids are exposed to more food options, and they aren't gobbling down packs of saturated-fat-filled, calorie-heavy snacks!
The program is funded by donations from parents, with the rest covered out of the teacher's own pocket. If school districts could spare a few hundred dollars a month to support snack programs like this, I think it could dramatically improve the health and well-being of students!
I find it interesting how you think taking your lunch in a brown bag seems less glamorous than eating a school lunch. Personally, I often envied those who packed a sack lunch when I didn’t. It was usually filled with delicious home-cooked meals. When we would all bring sack lunches, lunchtime would always turn into somewhat of a potluck or fiesta.
However, since many parents are too busy to always pack lunches for their children, the burden falls upon the school cafeterias. I also agree that schools must make the effort to ensure that budding children receive an ample meal filled with nutritional value.
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