Sunday
Nov072010
Can we get high school kids to eat healthier foods?
Sunday, November 7, 2010
From Jamie Oliver to new provincial nutritional standards and policies for schools, many school districts in North America have been pushing to improve nutritional standards. Some have set specific targets for eliminating trans fats and reducing levels of sugar and fat. Others have banned deep fryers and soft drinks. But, as the food in schools gets healthier, students are less likely to buy it. Instead, they head off campus to buy junk food.
A series of articles in the Globe and Mail in October looked at this issue. In "Hey kid, want some fries with that?" (Erin Anderssen, October 4, 2010), the reporter describes the lunch options that the cafeteria at Merivale High School in Ottawa has to compete with:
I never (okay, almost never) left the school grounds at lunchtime when I was in high school. It isn't that I didn't want to, but I was forbidden from doing so and my mother was known for driving by the school regularly during recess and lunchtime. I knew that the social consequences of not doing what the cool kids were doing were less than the social consequences of being yelled at by your mom in front of the cool kids. So, instead of heading down to the local corner store for a Pepsi, May West and pack of smokes, I opted for super nutritious meals like deep fried potato croquettes with gravy, a sugary juice box, and an ice cream sandwich from the school cafeteria. When I went to Australia on an exchange program in Grade 10, I did have the option of leaving campus for lunch, but I rarely did, because the fries with gravy at the school cafeteria were cheaper and tastier than the ones at McDonald's across the street. If there is a way to get unhealthy food, I think teenagers are pretty good at it.
So what is the solution? If offering healthier foods in school cafeterias only results in those cafeterias going out of business as the students run off to buy fast food, what else can our schools do? What else can parents do?
Kids need to eat. If they are given money to eat and the cheapest and best tasting food is junk food, then that is what they are going to eat. However, kids also like to spend their money on other things - clothing, technology, music, movies and more. When I went away to university, I lived on campus the first year. Being an on campus student meant that I had an "all you can eat" meal pass for the university's dining halls at breakfast, lunch and dinner. I also had spending money on top of that to use for clothing, recreation and...ummm...drinking. Although Tim Horton's or McDonald's sometimes sounded more appealing than the university dining hall (especially on the days when the piece of broccoli on the pizza was the same size as the piece of pizza), there was no way that I (or the other students) were going to give up our precious spending money on fast food if we could eat "for free" in the dining hall.
In that vein, perhaps one option for these schools that are implementing nutritious meal programs, would be to offer parents the opportunity to buy a meal card for their children that would either be an "all you can eat" meal card or a card for a certain number of meals at the school cafeteria. I think that if students had the option of getting a stir fry or a salad or a vegetable lasagna at the school cafeteria for "free" or using their precious spending money to go to McDonald's, they would probably opt for the school cafeteria more often than not.
Beyond that, parents can, of course, educate their children about making nutritious choices and can model good nutrition at home. But that only goes so far. If all of their peers are running down the road to McDonald's and pooling their money to buy fries, then even the kids with the role model parents are likely to get sucked in too. Make it easier for them to make good choices and those good choices will hopefully become habits that they keep with them for life.
What do you think? How can high schools get students to take advantage of more nutritious meal offerings?
Image credit: Scott Ableman on flickr
A series of articles in the Globe and Mail in October looked at this issue. In "Hey kid, want some fries with that?" (Erin Anderssen, October 4, 2010), the reporter describes the lunch options that the cafeteria at Merivale High School in Ottawa has to compete with:Pizza Pizza, Quiznos, Tim Hortons, Subway, Second Cup and a Metro grocery store, which opens its hot food counter at 11am and offers wedge fries for a cost effective 99 cents. A Harvey's restaurant sits kitty-corner from the school, with pop music playing loudly. McDonald's a block away, remains the stop of choice, says Brendan, a Grade 11 student.
I never (okay, almost never) left the school grounds at lunchtime when I was in high school. It isn't that I didn't want to, but I was forbidden from doing so and my mother was known for driving by the school regularly during recess and lunchtime. I knew that the social consequences of not doing what the cool kids were doing were less than the social consequences of being yelled at by your mom in front of the cool kids. So, instead of heading down to the local corner store for a Pepsi, May West and pack of smokes, I opted for super nutritious meals like deep fried potato croquettes with gravy, a sugary juice box, and an ice cream sandwich from the school cafeteria. When I went to Australia on an exchange program in Grade 10, I did have the option of leaving campus for lunch, but I rarely did, because the fries with gravy at the school cafeteria were cheaper and tastier than the ones at McDonald's across the street. If there is a way to get unhealthy food, I think teenagers are pretty good at it.
So what is the solution? If offering healthier foods in school cafeterias only results in those cafeterias going out of business as the students run off to buy fast food, what else can our schools do? What else can parents do?
Kids need to eat. If they are given money to eat and the cheapest and best tasting food is junk food, then that is what they are going to eat. However, kids also like to spend their money on other things - clothing, technology, music, movies and more. When I went away to university, I lived on campus the first year. Being an on campus student meant that I had an "all you can eat" meal pass for the university's dining halls at breakfast, lunch and dinner. I also had spending money on top of that to use for clothing, recreation and...ummm...drinking. Although Tim Horton's or McDonald's sometimes sounded more appealing than the university dining hall (especially on the days when the piece of broccoli on the pizza was the same size as the piece of pizza), there was no way that I (or the other students) were going to give up our precious spending money on fast food if we could eat "for free" in the dining hall.
In that vein, perhaps one option for these schools that are implementing nutritious meal programs, would be to offer parents the opportunity to buy a meal card for their children that would either be an "all you can eat" meal card or a card for a certain number of meals at the school cafeteria. I think that if students had the option of getting a stir fry or a salad or a vegetable lasagna at the school cafeteria for "free" or using their precious spending money to go to McDonald's, they would probably opt for the school cafeteria more often than not.
Beyond that, parents can, of course, educate their children about making nutritious choices and can model good nutrition at home. But that only goes so far. If all of their peers are running down the road to McDonald's and pooling their money to buy fries, then even the kids with the role model parents are likely to get sucked in too. Make it easier for them to make good choices and those good choices will hopefully become habits that they keep with them for life.
What do you think? How can high schools get students to take advantage of more nutritious meal offerings?
Image credit: Scott Ableman on flickr
Reader Comments (32)
I have just a minute to comment... I'm thinking about this subject a lot as my son is in 1st grade and no one seems to be thinking about this.
I think it starts earlier to teach about healthy choices. Linking cooking health foods excersice gardening w the curriculum. I think the foundation needs 2b set so teens can make choices. Of course they will need reminders incentives and support. they need tasty healthy options & plans like you suggested and creativity. Kids cooking, creating menus-- tons of fun learning opportunities to take advantage of. Cooking is creative too- perhaps a good outlet for many.
I think you've got a really good plan there. I've rarely seen college kids with meal cards leave campus unless where they were going to accepted the college meal cards (there's a local pizzeria that takes the local college meal cards), and when they do, they enjoy it as the treat it is (never a time saver since they have to leave campus to do it). Highschool might be a little more tricky than college since the whole living at home thing comes into play, but what you suggest is much more likely to work than any other ideas that I've seen except really, really tasty fresh food.
A lot of people who are concerned enough to complain have to get together and get advertising and product placements out of the schools. I think that would be a good first step anyway. Do you read Spoonfed Blog Annie? She has lots of good ideas. :)
I would brown-bag a pretty good lunch and then buy smokes with whatever cash I had. Maybe if I hadn't been allowed off-campus I wouldn't have been buying smokes. During the day.
Kids are stupid.
Actually, thinking about high school food options there just weren't any places worth going to right around my high school. But there was a corner store for all my cigarette needs.
Kids are stupid. So how do we get them to be less stupid? Do we take away more of their choices by making sure they only have access to healthy options? If they only have healthy options in the cafeteria and aren't allowed to leave campus for lunch, will that change anything?
Do we start earlier with increased independence for food choices with systematic methods of increasing their knowledge of good choices and likelihood they will make those choices in the future?
Kids' brains are wired differently, socially and developmentally they are ill prepared to make choices when the consequences of those choices are far enough into the future that they don't connect them. So where do we start with a teenage brain? Start young.
I don't know what the Canadian school cafeteria offerings are like, but in the US the ones that aren't subsidized by the fast food joints are pretty dismal. Perhaps the first step to enticing our teens to be willing to avoid the fast food and pick nutritious foods is to make the food look enticing and appetizing and then actually follow through with being appetizing and nutritious. Lowest bidder gets the contract to provide school foods, so seriously low-quality meat provides the "nutrition" in school lunches. Much else that is served comes from a can, or is frozen, and is opened and heated before being served - no actual food was harmed in the making of this school lunch. Other wonderful offerings like soda, chips, super sugary snacks, or fast food are presented in a separate line. Granted, many of the school lunches (and breakfasts for those that serve them) are offered low-cost or free to the students, which means the school budget is carrying the cost - however, I know that it is possible to buy food inexpensively without buying cheap food. I'm glad to see chefs Jamie Oliver and Ann Cooper doing something to bring about the changes desperately needed in school lunches.
I think it's a genius idea to offer meal plan types for high school kids. That way, if they want to waste their money going off campus to eat, they can, but otherwise, they'll eat what's there.
All way through school - and high-school - my parents (actually my dad) prepared sandwiches for me. So I didn't have to spend my money on food. My kid (14 months old) is in daycare now and I usually provide the food for him, as I don't want him to eat bread with margarine or sausages from the can or biscuits. But it's getting more difficult, as he loves biscuits and starts to want to eat what the other kids are eating. When he'll get older I will also explain the nutrition abc and teach him to read a label, but he will always have a lunch box from home (at least that's my plan). Btw, I am Romanian and live in The Netherlands.
I went to school in a rural area. The school proper was in a tiny village that only had one gas station and no retaurants to speak of. There was a school policy that students could not leave campus at all during the day, so it was pack a lunch or eat the cafeteria food. And there was no choice with the cafeteria food. There was a main dish, two sides, a roll and 2% milk. That was it. It was good food, though. I may be biased because my mother was a cook there (many were her own recipes), but it was all made from scratch, even (especially) the bread. I miss those rolls. :)
So, for us, there was no choice except for the nutritional* meal offered or what you brought in yourself. Kids who brought lunches were in the minority because most students qualified for free or reduced lunches.
I don't know if these things -no leaving campus, limited food options- are at all feasible for larger, urban schools, but I think this is one area where children could benefit from having the guess work taken out of it. And, if they complain, well it's only one meal a day and they can have their Micky D's on the weekend.
*I don't know about fat or sodium content. I just know they were "well-rounded meals" according to the food pyramid, and nothing was ever fried. Even french-fries were cooked in the oven. For reference, I graduated high school 14 years ago.
I'd like to know how these kids are getting spending money to buy off of school grounds, anyway? My mother, albeit she was a single mother with four kids, was very strict about the money she gave us and what it was for. We wouldn't think about spending it on fast food, because that would mean we couldn't get something for the sports team or after school program we wanted. Or (gasp!) the new jeans we really wanted. With three girls, clothes came first before spending money on food that wasn't already in our fridge at home!
Any other 'spending' money we had to earn from our part-time jobs. So we learned early the value of a dollar, and would hang onto our money for important things like Friday nights, weekends out with our friends or the designer jeans or shoes my mother wouldn't pay for (she usually pitched in a reasonable about, and we had to make up the rest). Why are high school kids being provided with more money beyond this?
My mother also packed us a lunch everyday. If we didn't like what she packed, we were welcome to pack our own, and she ensured we had healthy options to choose from in the fridge. Peanut butter and jam with carrot sticks were staples for us in high school and we were happy to eat this. I guess that would be out today, but I'm sending my two little ones with quick & easy sunbutter sandwiches, which they love.
It starts at home. If parents aren't eating healthy themselves or teaching healthy alternatives, and children don't learn the value of a dollar, then when they are in high school they will be happy giving their money to McDonald's. My 5-year old doesn't even know what a Happy Meal is, and I'm perfectly content with that. I'm hoping by the time she's in high school she is as utterly disgusted by a Big Mac as her mother, and will be happy choosing the chicken salad or packing her own lunch. At home, she won't be given any other choice than to choose the healthier alternatives. It's all she will have ever known.
I like your "all you can eat" meal card idea. If children were offered only healthy options beginning in elementary school, maybe the meal card idea would work. Items like breakfast pizza and chicken nuggets served with french fries should be completely unacceptable. If our children did not have those options when they were young, perhaps they would make better choices when they are teenagers.
At the time, I didn't think it was a good thing, but now I realize how fortunate I was to grow up with a single mum on a VERY tight budget. I didn't have spare money kicking around to blow on lunches at KFC or McD's. Any money I earned from my part-time job had to go for clothes, school supplies, the cost of extra-cirricular activities, etc. because my mum couldn't pay for that -- her money went to mortgage and providing really healthy meals.
Mum had to cook homemade meals (I think processed food in the 70's and 80's was way more expensive than it is today). Of course, I didn't appreciate it at the time. Who would want homemade macaroni and cheese when you could have KD at a friend's house? Homemade chicken noodle soup or beef barley soup instead of Campbell's?
My high school didn't have a cooking cafeteria -- you had to either bring a bagged lunch, go out or go home for lunch. I couldn't afford to go out often and bagged lunches could only be foods that could be kept in our locker so I went home for home-cooked leftovers.
The carryover from how I was raised is that I cannot comprehend how kids have that much disposable income that they can afford to eat out so often. $5 / day = approx $100 / month just for eating out (and I know that is a low estimate here in Canada where I believe fast food is more expensive than in the US)???
I like the idea of the meal card (which I had in university also) but I think the problem is that if it is their parents' money, some kids are fine with wasting it and they would still go out to eat. Maybe the meal card would have to have a reporting function option for parents so they could see what their kids purchased? But would this be too much parental control?
Where I went to high school we didn't have a cafeteria but we had vending machines and the guy was there filling them daily- I bought my lunch from home most days and one Friday a month I go buy subs for my Dad and I (he worked close by) walked to the plant he worked at and we lunched- My best high school memory ever.
I took over the school lunch program at my kids school and ran it for 3 years. Let me just say that change is not easy. I was fought tooth and nail when I wanted to remove the weekly offering of pizza and hot dogs and bring in healthier options. As for the pizza and hot dog I wasn't planning to take them completely away but alternate them weekly- no go. What I had to do in the end was offer more days of hot lunches. In the winter we offered cheese ravioli with a tomato sauce and chicken noodle soup. In the warmer months it was chicken caesar salad or regular salad. There was complaints but most parents said "I'd buy my kids lunch everyday if I could" and they wanted the healthier options.
Annie I would love the all you can eat card but only if the schools change their food choices. At home the fruits and veggies go fast and I think if it was available more in the schools the kids would choose it over the junk food. Also when they see all their friends choosing it they're more likely to pick it as well, imagine peer pressure working for us for a change! :)
Cherie-Lynn,
I absolutely agree that healthier options need to come first. I was proposing this as a solution for schools that have implemented those changes, only to find their students going out for fast food instead.
i love the idea of the meal card, backed up with not giving the child any extra money so it's their own allowance being spent on extras
as for starting early in teaching nutrition - have none of you been berated by a 6y old yet on the nutritional choices you provide each day for meals? the kids are indoctrinated in everything from healthy eating to recycling to handwashing in this school district from kindergarten. it does happen once they get to school.
PS: schools here also don't seem to have canteens or kitchens - all children bring their own lunches or join the hot lunch program once per week
Tamara:
When I was in high school I had "lunch money" to buy my lunch in the school cafeteria. I assume that is what many of these kids have too, but instead of using it in the cafeteria, they are using it at fast food places. In the article I read, they quoted one girl who did bring a lunch from home every day. She would eat her turkey sandwich and then offer up her grapes as a trade for some of the fries that the other kids were buying at McDonald's.
Laura:
I agree that a nutritional and taste makeover is required in a lot of school cafeterias. However, I do think it is sad when schools have gone through that process, only to have students go off campus to buy deep fried fast food because they can't get it on campus anymore.
I have a few things to say about this... first off, I truly believe many parents are to blame. We've lost the sense of what REAL food is and it's because of the fact that we never see real food in our houses. There is no sit down as a family at supper time and no one is cooking food from scratch anymore - I know, we lack time and energy and it's a society issue... yes, I'm generalizing here, but the point is that if kids grown up seeing and being served REAL food and not processed crap, hot-dogs and nuggets and chips as snacks, then at least some concept of health will be the basis for their learning how/what to eat.
Yes, they will likely still want to get junk food. I certainly did as a teenager. I sometimes ate horribly as a teenager. I did leave campus for fries and sauce at lunch... but, my parents NEVER bought junk for us at home. No soda. No chips. Only at holidays. Everything else was entirely home made (and my mom worked full time). We sat down as a family every single supper.
I also had very limited spending money and no money was given to me for lunch - it was a brown bag lunch. Why are they getting money instead of home made lunches to bring to school? Why aren't the parents aren't making them lunches?
And, even of they seem to have poor eating habits, if their parents instil good eating habits from the start then they'll more likely remember these good habits once they get past the rebellious teenage stage. That's what I did - I used to eat 2 chocolate bars a day in high school, now I am the healthiest nut around and no chocolate or processed foods in my house.
I think your suggestion of a meal card for the school cafeteria is a great one. I would have chosen that option for my kids because I hate hearing that they've eaten pizza every day for lunch with the lunch money I've given them.
When I was in high school, seniors were allowed to go off campus for lunch. I would often join my boyfriend and other friends at Wendy's... bringing my own sack lunch with me. My mom didn't give me lunch money, and I didn't have a job, so I made my own sandwiches at home. I don't think I ever ate cafeteria food, actually, and only very, very rarely would I splurge and buy fast food for lunch. I think some sort of meal card would work (assuming the school food is decent... most here in the US are as bad if not worse than fast food). I agree with you that no matter what parents do, teen peer pressure will make most kids cave and go with the junk.
First off, I think our whole society is to blame, not just parents. From the very young up to the very old, we live in a world where processed food has become the norm and fewer and fewer of us know where food comes from. And the food manufactures have a lot of money and they do a lot of sponsoring and advertising. So we are all faced with temptation around every corner. And let's be honest, we are biologically wired to go for high sugar, high fat foods because a couple hundred years ago eating foods with higher calories could mean survival. So we are fighting big money in food as well as our own instincts. So I think it is whole society movement we need to get back to real food.
I think the idea of a meal plan card is a good one. It is going to take a lot of little steps to get to a place where well all eat better (myself included). But we need to do it. I do think though that if you start a kid young eating real, healthy food, it will have an impact when they are teenagers.
I agree that the society we live in plays a major part in this debate... but we can only get so far by saying that. At some point we'll have to take personal responsibility for our own actions too. If everyone did that for themselves and their family then, in turn, society would change. Because WE are society. Advertising, manufacturers, processed foods are all there because we let them. We, as individuals buy into the whole temptation. We control what we buy and can make better choices for ourselves and our families.
I'm only a few years out of school myself ('04 hs grad) but at my high school we weren't allowed off-campus, and most students paid by a pre-paid meal plan that involved punching in a pin number to "check-out" of the cafeteria, although you could pay cash too if you preferred (like when I forgot to bring my lunch). I brought my lunch pretty much everyday and it included a peanut butter or deli meat sandwich, some fresh fruit, some fresh veggies, and maybe a couple cookies or a handful of chips. I drank water or occasionally bought a milk carton. Why? Because homemade food personalized the way you want almost always tastes better than mass-produced cafeteria food, which tends to be bland and boring.
I think if parents provide healthy options that their kids like and which taste good, and educate their kids on why it's better to eat healthy (maintaining a healthy weight and being a better athlete were my dietary goals in high school!), I honestly think that most kids will choose to eat eat those healthy options. I definitely blame parents if kids are regularly choosing fast food (occasional treats is a totally different story), although as teenagers the kids themselves do have to accept some personal responsibility for their choices as well.
One way I think schools could help is by stepping up their nutrition courses. We had to do a "health" class one semester of junior high that included sex ed and a tiny bit of nutrition, and that's it. I think if nutrition were included more in generic science classes in elementary schools and junior high, it would help kids make better choices. But no, I don't think it's the school's job to control kids' diet.
One more random thought: I was a cross-country runner and our coaches talked a ton about nutrition. We were pretty much told we weren't allowed to drink soda at all during the season, and were encouraged to always eat healthy. I wonder if other coaches do the same, and if there's a significant difference in the diets of student-athletes vs. non-athletes who wouldn't have that same motivation?
I have found that the education component of nutrition is much improved, but the school undermines it by providing junk in the cafeteria day after day. My kids (not in high school, but one is headed there next year) take a lunch from home that includes fruit, veggies, cheese, wholewheat bread, leftovers... but they come home and say that their lunches don't look like anyone else's. Also, the offerings from the school include chicken nuggets, rotated with chicken fingers and chicken burgers, hamburgers, hot dogs, french fries. They would only do each one once in a month, and there are healthier choices about once a week, but how am I supposed to counteract this other than sheer force of will?
I really like your idea of the food card to keep kids at the school rather than running off to the fast food joints, though. We're just starting so far behind where I live.
Here we can prepay for school lunches and the money goes on their card. But at 3.75 a day got a high school lunch, it is pricey and very low quality food. I can't really prepay and give money so that he has a choice.
We make a brown bag lunch for both of our highschoolers. It's filled with healthy food as well as one 'junk'. We provide good choices at home. I have one who told me to stop putting junk in his lunch and give him more protein, and the other who 'forgets' her lunch everyday at home, and prefers to eat croissants and cookies. We can only educate and provide choice. Unfortunately, at this age, we've lost control. They are almost grown-up human beings with the desire to be independent. If the school cafeterias only had healthy food and we could load up a card, that might be a great option. However, the peer pressure to leave school and go hang out elsewhere is strong.
I totally agree with everything you've said. I don't think that monitoring what is being spent is too much parental control. Not if the parent is spending the money on the meal card and the college tuition. I paid for most of my college as did my siblings. We were careful how our money was spent because we were the ones earning it. Now as a parent, if I fork out money for something I have every right to know how it's really being spent. If my child has a problem with it, they can pay for it themselves.
I think about nutrition a lot. And I think about food a lot. So this is a subject that's dear to my heart, although I don't know if what I have to say will be to anyone's liking.
1) America doesn't have a food culture. (What's "Italian food?" Think of "Chinese food." or we go out for "Indian food." All pretty self explanatory.) But when you think of "American food" what do you think of? Burgers, pizza, fries, chicken nuggets. The only food culture we have is of fast food, because we don't have a strong food culture to counteract the food megacorps and the agriculture megacorps (supported fully by government subsidies for wheat, corn, soy, and dairy, which are then broken down in the hundreds of components like gluten, maltodextrin, soy protein isolate, corn syrup, xanthan gum, etc, and have to be put back together in what we call "processed food-like substances.")
So kids want to be like other kids, and most kids in this culture eat "kid fast food" which is burgers, fries, chicken nuggets, and neon-colored yogurt. So unless you belong to a subculture where there is a strong food culture (vegans, Weston Price followers, large farming families), your kids are going to want to eat like the dominant culture.
2) What you think of as "healthy" is not what everyone thinks of as "healthy." Personally, I like Weston Price - grass fed meat and eggs, raw full-fat dairy, gluten free, organic produce, preferrably out of my own backyard, little to no soy, plenty of fat and naturally occuring fat-soluable vitamins. But I can't get that in an institutionalized meal plan. And plenty of people would be horrified that I want my kids to eat fat (from grass-fed meat) and full-fat dairy (from pastured cows) and not have bread (or goldfish crackers, which for some ongodly reason are the staple of preschool snack programs). Some people want their kids to eat more soy. Some people eat kosher or halal. Some are vegans or vegetarians. You can't please them all, or provide what is considered "healthy" for them all.
So whoever is calling the shots at the institution gets to decide. That usually means the federal government, since they subsidize the school meal program. And frankly, I don't have a problem with hamburgers (provided they're grass-fed, no bun for me, thanks) or "oven fries" - federally funded school fries are actually baked, since there are strict limits on the amt of fat allowed - but my problem is that they get the CHEAPEST MEAT POSSIBLE, and a lot of it is being treated with AMMONIA to kill pathogens created from the factory farming system. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/31/us/31meat.html
Even the problems we have with the food are different - some of you are upset because to you, a hamburger and french fries is junk food. I'm upset because they use chemically treated factory farmed meat and pesticide-laden potatoes. Others would be upset because they don't believe in eating meat. Others have no problem with that menu at all. See where the problem is?
ONE GINORMOUS INSTITUTIONALIZED SYSTEM CANNOT MAKE EVERYONE HAPPY. That sucks. I'm over it.
But the biggest thing on my mind:
3) You really don't have control over your high schooler's eating habits. Seriously. Put away that delusion right now. You barely have control over what your grade schooler eats. And I don't believe high school lunch makes that big of a difference. College is different because you're captive - 3 meals a day, plus snacks from the cafe. But one meal a day in high school? That totals what, 600 calories? And a high school boy eats maybe 3000-5000 calories a day, especially if he's an athlete? ITS NOT THAT BIG OF A DEAL. And Honestly, extended breastfeeding, avoiding food allergens, and not eating processed food makes the biggest difference in a child's health. Not a tiny school lunch. Your kid could eat the gold-standard of lunch, and then at 3:15 run out for half a pizza and a big gulp with her friends. So the bottom line is, if their OVERALL diet is healthy for them (their metabolism, body type, activity level), they'll be fine OVERALL.
People will decide their diets for themselves, in the absence of a food culture (we are food schizophrenic in America). Usually that happens after trial and error, some self-reflection, and a few too many "oh my god"'s the morning after.
My favorite authors on the subject: Michael Pollan ("In Defense of Food" and "The Omnivore's Dilemma") and Gary Taubes ("Good Calories, Bad Calories"). Marion Nestle ("Food Politics") is also a good one, and she has a blog by the same title.
It's funny that you wrote on this topic. I've been intending to write a post on my blog about the food options for people at my university. Your post has motivated me to get on it. We've recently established on-campus housing, and the food options grew. We have Sodexo (don't get me started), and the food options aren't ideal. Though there are lots of healthy options, there are racks of junk food and ice cream and more carbonated beverages than a case of mentos could explode.
Anyway, I find it hypocritical that the campus makes a big push for healthy lifestyles, but still essentially promotes bad eating habits. I'm not against junk food; I eat my share. But it doesn't have to be the highest profile food throughout our food options.
Thanks for tolerating my rant. :)
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