Are the Kids All Right?

In previous posts I've discussed the alarming statistic that nearly 20 percent of children ages 6-11 years in the U.S. are obese. Fortunately, this statistic has also had an impact on the current administration - Michelle Obama announced a nationwide campaign called "Let's Move" in early 2010 to battle childhood obesity and towards the end of that year President Obama signed The Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act of 2010 into law.

The "Let's Move" campaign is comprised of four strategies to lower childhood obesity rates:

1. Get parents more informed about nutrition and exercise.
2. Improve the quality of food in schools.
3. Make healthy foods more affordable and accessible for families.
4. Focus more on physical education.

The Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act targets the second and third objectives of the "Let's Move" campaign. Specifically, the bill authorizes funding for federal school meal and child nutrition programs and increases access to healthy food for low-income children. Some of the changes that the bill has made include:

• Gives the U.S. Department of Agriculture the authority to set nutritional standards for all foods sold in schools during the school day, including vending machines.
• Provides additional funding to schools that meet updated nutritional standards of federally subsidized lunches.
• Sets basic standards for school wellness policies including goals for nutrition promotion and education and physical activity.

All of this sounds very progressive, but you're probably wondering how much it costs - according to the White House, in addition to reauthorizing child nutrition programs for five years, the bill will provide $4.5 billion in new funding to these programs over 10 years. Figures like those make me miss the heady days of late 2010, when child nutrition legislation could get passed with a unanimous vote by the Senate and a vote of 264-157 in the House.

Of course, now we're in 2011, and economists are no longer making rosy projections about unemployment decreasing and consumer confidence bouncing back. Instead we have debt crises and double-dip recessions. So it's not surprising that public schools are worried about the rising costs of serving lunch. Reports The New York Times:

Under a little-noticed provision of the child nutrition bill signed by President Obama in December, which brought more fresh produce and less whole milk to cafeterias nationwide, school districts are required to start bringing their prices in line with what it costs to prepare the meals, eventually charging an average of $2.46 for the lunches they serve.

Right now, many schools charge less than the cost to prepare meals because the federal government provides financial help per meal for schools participating in the National School Lunch Program. This provision has therefore contributed to price increases in a number of school districts this fall, and the worry is that more parents will be compelled to pack their children's lunches or skip on paying cafeteria lunch fees altogether.

But in California, that already seems to be happening, and not because of pricing. The NY Times reports that snack food trucks have begun popping up outside of schools, offering the sort of sweet and salty treats that are no longer available on cafeteria menus. It seems that teenagers will go out of their way - and spend more - to procure the unhealthy snacks that the child nutrition bill expelled from schools' lunch menus last December.

So when schools can't cover the cost of producing more nutritious lunches, and children avoid those meals anyway, how do we solve the problem of childhood obesity? In California they've added chocolate chip cookies to the menu in an attempt to lure students back from the food trucks, but somehow that doesn't seem like the solution.

In America, one in three children is overweight or obese, indicating that an unhealthy diet is considered culturally acceptable. Indeed, people often refer to veganism as a "radical diet," yet diets consisting of food high in calories, fat, saturated fat and sugar are never spoken of as extreme. It therefore seems like we won't see any real change in obesity statistics until nutrition education becomes more widespread.