GET HEALTHY! GET MOVING!  

Child nutrition, particularly school lunch, has become a hot button issue in the last few years. With obesity and Type-2 diabetes rates soaring, and the appearance of diet-related heart disease in children, as a nation, we are in crisis. School districts across the country are making fundamental changes in the food they serve to kids, eliminating sweets, fats, soda, fried foods and vending machines. This is great news, but as a recent article in The Times suggests, it may not be enough. This is a problem with many causes and simply improving five meals out of the twenty-one that a child eats each week will not solve the greater problem. Which is not to say that I don't want to provide the healthiest lunches possible, but we, that's you and I, need to do more.

 

At Saint Ann's, we have served only hormone-free, organic skim milk for more than a decade. We were ahead of the curve in terms of getting rid of soda and "junk" food (much to the kids' chagrin!) We have whole wheat bread and try to serve whole grains as much as possible, have cut way back on sugar and buy very few products containing high fructose corn syrup. Kids eat a lot of raw veggies from the salad bar, but aren't too keen on hot vegetables, regardless of how we prepare them. When I find hot veggies that they do like--broccoli, snow peas, beans--we serve them frequently. I think most Saint Ann's kids are healthier than the U.S. average, but there is still cause for concern.

 

While there are myriad reasons for the health crisis children now face, I genuinely believe there are two main causes: television and packaging.

  
  -Every hour a child spends watching tv is an hour he or she is not moving.
  -Kids, and adults, often snack while watching tv, ingesting excess calories and not moving.
  -Kids are bombarded with advertising, pushing, pushing, pushing junk food.
 

-The processed food industry spends billions of dollars each year advertising to children, advertising which is impossible to resist.

After fifteen years of feeding children, there are two things that still amaze me. Actually, there are many things that amaze me, but two that really alarm me:
  
 

-The younger the child, the better he or she eats. First and second graders consistently eat more healthful food and seem to crave less "junk." By Middle School, though, the junkier the food the better. The older they get, the more they become indoctrinated into the American way of unhealthy eating.

 

-Kids are addicted to packaging. It doesn't seem to matter what's in the shiny, pretty box, bag or bottle. I have served individual boxes of Cheerios one day, and the same size serving in paper bowls the next day, and kids swear to me that the cereal in the boxes tastes better and is a larger portion. While it is true that there is some packaged nutritious food, what disturbs me is that kids don't read labels, check ingredients, read calorie counts and make informed decisions; they just like the boxes. For this reason, we got rid of prepackaged foods in the dining room.

I don't think television is inherently evil, but if kids watch three, four, five hours a day, it is an uphill battle to change their preferences in and understanding of food. In terms of education, we simply can't compete with McDonald's, Frito-Lay and Coca Cola.