Letters to the Editor
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Where are the parents?
Really? Where are they? Do they care? Do they ask the kid, "Hey, how was school? What did you have for lunch? How's the food there?" Do they pack a lunch for the kid? Do they say they are too busy, even though it only takes about 15 minutes to throw a sandwich and some fruit in a lunchbox? Are they lobbying the school to have decent lunches?
What's in the shopping cart?
I honestly don't get it. I really don't. My mother gave me carrot sticks as a snack. I'd get one chocolate bar as a snack, not a big bag of chips. She taught me to pack my own lunch. We had things like meat and vegetables for dinner. She worked from 8AM to 3PM and had a 1 hour drive each way to and from the schools she taught. How could my mom do this and not modern moms? She was even obese. Go figure. My siblings and I are not obese and never were. We figured it was just her. We didn't inherit her obesity, either through behavior or genetics.
So, again, what's with the parents?
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treats v. eating junk food as a meal
If a child is hungry and that child reaches for junk food that’s a problem we need to work on – especially in poor communities where children are unsupervised after school (when most kids are looking for a snack) and junk food is cheap and easy to come by. Rather then hearing about Carol’s daughter, and her granola school, it would be nice to take this debate to a poor areas and talk about school provided breakfasts, lunches, after school programs and affordable child care.
Carol – I think it’s time for some deep breaths or your run the risk of giving your daughter a weight complex before she even hits puberty.
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Big (sic) Health v. Big Ag
"But the failure of nutritional programs reminds me of the failure of abstinence programs."
I don't know which government policy is undermining abstinence programs like Big Agri policies which are at loggerheads with Big (sic) Health.
I can't help but wonder how much of that $1bil yearly is wasted just trying to counteract the promotion of junk food at captive students? (See Greg Critser's "Fat Land", etc.)
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Nutritional education is not just in schools anymore
Anybody watched Sesame Street recently? Every episode has a lot of content about nutrition and exercise. But I'm not convinced that even Cookie Monster telling kids to eat carrots instead of cookies is going to make a dent.
On the other hand, obsessing about food and nutrition, as we are obviously doing as a society, doesn't seem to be solving the problems of obesity, bad diet, and inactivity.
In my old school district they have a new policy that if you bring treats to school, say, cupcakes to celebrate a birthday, you also have to bring a healthy alternative. Ha! How many second-graders do you think are going to say "no, thanks" to the cupcake and eat an apple instead?
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It's the soda.
Unfortunately, even education pails in comparison to the biological desire for sweet, salty, and fatty foods. A lot of people go the fast food but diet soda route. Mmm... bad times.
In both cases, whether consuming full calorie or diet soda, doing so with a meal doesn't help things. For one, the high fructose corn syrup tastes sweet but doesn't give the metabolic boost that sugar does. Instead you get the calories without a corresponding bump in calorie burning power. Beyond that, the average 20 oz. soda has something like the equivalent of 16 tablespoons of sugar in it. How does less sweet more healthy food compete?
For those that make the move to diet sodas, it's not much better. First, according to the aspartame lobby's website aspartame "enhances and extends flavors". This is a true statement. Aspartame makes carbohydrates taste better making all those slices of pizza, burgers, and chips take GREAT, encouraging over eating. Aspartame just last week came under fire again for being a carcinogen too. There have been calls to reevaluate the safety of the drug. And like the full calorie sodas, sweet beverages demand fat, salty foods to stand up to them.
Let's face it, we're in a world of convenience. We don't even go inside the fast food restaurant anymore. 70%+ of all fast food sales happen at the drive thru window. And the overwhelming percentage of the time, a soda makes it into the car along with the food.
It's no wonder kids and adults can't get their palettes focused on more healthy foods. They don't taste good with soda. They also don't taste good *because* of soda. We're overwhelmed with sweetness.
I'm not so radical as to suggest that people stop with the sodas forever - but if one is looking to regulate their weight, they will get much further much easier if they stop with the Coke and Pepsi products.
When in need of a soda fix, GuS (Grown Up Soda) and Izzy are two great brands that focus on fruit flavored sodas sweetened with natural cane sugar.
Food education is great but like sex education it has its limits. Abstinence education isn't going to keep people from having sex. The food pyramid isn't going to keep people from eating doughnuts. Consider my "drop the soda" recommendation as the "wear a condom" advice for healthy eating.
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treats
I fought that one at a local school to no avail. The teachers and admins really wanted to reward kids and had decided that candy was the way to go. Here I had been banishing candy from the house and those ass wipes were handing it out at school.
Then there is the mediocre performance that warranted a candy reward. They lowered the bar so far that the rewards were non stop.
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it's what we eat
It's the high-fructose corn syrup and canola oil, as well as the fat, sugar and salt.
The additives that make "food products" easy to transport, store and preserve: in other words, not *food* but *food products*. (Oh, yeah, they are also highly lucrative cash crops for big agri-corps.)
We can change how we eat, however inconvenient and "difficult" it may be.
We can shop the produce, butcher, dairy and bakery aisles *only* and skip all the stuff that comes in a box. We can shop farmer's markets and support local farmers and skip the supermarket a few days a week. We can re-learn, as a nation, how to cook instead of heating up premade meals. It's really not that hard: we've been told it's hard by those who sell "convenience foods."
Kids are easier to train. And I say this as a woman who routinely ate 2 huge chocolate chip cookies and a half-pint of milk for lunch all through high school. (Considering I didn't drink, smoke, or screw around, chocolate seems like a mild self-destructive adsolescent bahavior. But I still cringe at rembering my teenage eating habits!) I did thisbecause I could: mom gave me lunch money, and the cafe was a l carte. Why would I eat something healthy when what I wanted was right there?
We can insist that schools only provide whle food snacks: milk or water instead of soda. Fruit and cereal instead of Twinkies. We can demand more salad and fewer tater tots. (We'll have to fund these changes, but I'd rather spend my money on food than on insulin). We can keep our houses free of fruit-flavored crap an full of actual fruit, veggies, popcorn and whole grain snacks.
By the time kids are old enough to make their own choices, they will have a ewll-established habit of eating well. Hungry kids will eat what's there. They will eat healthy dfood if that's what hey're given. They will eat utter crap if that's what's provided.