Let's Blame Harry Truman

For the childhood obesity epidemic that the United States faces currently. Okay, no, I don’t really mean that. But he is, indirectly, at fault for the high fat, high calorie school lunches we serve to our children on a daily basis. In 1946, Truman passed the National School Lunch Act, which was meant to counteract the high rate of malnourished children in the United States (boy have things changed since then.) The National School Lunch Act guaranteed that a hot lunch would be provided by the government to all students that could not financially afford it. Today the average school lunch contains approximately 600 calories, that’s more than half of what children up to the age of eight are recommended as a daily allowance. Combined with a school provided breakfast averaging up to 400 calories, the two school provided meals could actually meet a child’s daily caloric needs comfortably. To be fair to the government, the caloric recommendations they make for school lunches are meant as a safeguard against starvation and malnutrition. The idea is that even if the child doesn’t eat any other meal that day they would still be able to maintain necessary function. This is actually the problem. Most of the children in this country are not starving to death, and after they ingest a whopping 1000 calories between their school provided breakfast and lunch, they then go home and have a snack and dinner, leaving them way above their daily needs, resulting in excess weight gain.

In this past weekend’s New York Times Magazine, the feature article was titled The School-Lunch Test. It was an exceptionally eye opening article that dealt with independent groups throughout the country working with public schools to make their school lunches more nutritious, and to also bring about change in nutritional education to younger children. The key group the article followed was a group led by Dr. Arthur Agatson (otherwise known as the South Beach Diet author) entitled HOPS—Healthier Options for Public Schoolchildren. Dr. Agatson’s staff worked with a public school in the Kissimmee, Florida public school system, where most of the children were from low income families, and qualified for government paid-for lunches. Team HOPS, worked with the government rationed foods that the school district received, they traded tater tots for sweet potatoes, and breaded chicken patties for grilled chicken. The program also subsidized the substitution of whole wheat products for their government provided white bread counterparts, subsidizing the cost difference between low fat and standard issue government cheese, also bringing in more fresh vegetables, and substituted their school breakfast of Lucky Charms and Fruit Loops for Total and Raisin Bran. They also brought in a nutrition educator, partially paid for by the Kellogg institute, to come in to speak with the kids about nutrition, to teach them about it on their terms by incorporating into stories, and bring in exciting facts about different types of fruits and vegetables. The HOPS program even worked with teachers to adjust math and science programs to include nutrition in ways that would not interrupt their class plan or take away from their preparation for statewide tests.

The most surprising part of this article was the reaction by the staff and the families of these children. You would think that most parents would be happy that their children were learning to make smart choices, but most seemed aggravated and angry. Calling the board of education complaining that their children were being put on the South Beach Diet (having read the South Beach Diet book, the school plan and the diet plan have very little in common, but that’s just my opinion), and complaining that their children refuse to eat anything unhealthy any more and won’t eat what they put in front of them (Good for those kids!) I was most surprised by the response by Jean Palmore, the director of food services for the public school system, who in interviews publicly discussed her own dislike for whole grains and sweet potatoes, and she couldn’t even imagine children wanting to eat that. Talk about not having a good example for these children to follow.

And there’s been good news for the school, 23 of the 486 students classified at the beginning of the project are now considered normal or at risk of becoming overweight. Yes that’s only a 4.7% change in the status of overweight children, but that’s a great start. The study found that the control schools within the same district, had a slight increase in children deemed overweight.

The 2006-2007 school year, marks the first that public schools will receive government subsidies to help them create healthy eating, nutritional education and increased physical fitness plans for their children. This is a huge step in the right direction for our national public schools. The fact is that children are taught to eat badly. As adults, we consider children finicky eaters and give them foods that we think will satisfy them with little to no fuss, like chicken fingers, hamburgers, pizza, mozzarella sticks, french fries, and our school lunches reflect that. Schools provide food that they think kids will eat with no fuss, most of the food the government sends to our schools is deep fried processed foods that need only be reheated before serving, instead of fresh foods that need thought and preparation. By teaching our children from a young age that the foods that ‘they eat’ are fried finger foods, we are allowing them to go into adult hood considering those foods to be acceptable parts of a daily diet. Perhaps it is for this reason that the children of today are the first in history to be expected to have a shorter life expectancy than their parents! And that the Center for Disease Control has predicted that 30-40 percent of today’s children will become diabetic in their lifetime. If we don’t do something now to teach out children proper eating habits we will inadvertently kill them.