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Will booting junk food out of the schools keep kids from getting fat?
Two years ago, when Cheri Dotson stood in front of a sixth-grade class and asked if any of the children had broken a bone in the past year, half of them raised their hands. She was surprised, but as lead nurse for the Santa Fe Public Schools, Dotson knew she wasn't looking at a sudden increase in klutziness. She knew right away: "They're not getting enough milk!"
Kids are drinking less milk and more soda than ever before, and studies show that as they lose calcium, their risk of bone fractures is three to four times higher. But broken bones are only a small part of the picture. Just one extra soft drink a day means a 60 percent greater chance that a kid will become obese. According to New York University nutrition professor Marion Nestle, American kids get more than one-third of their daily calories from sodas, candy, salty snacks and fast food. And that's a problem for kids, parents, school districts, health care providers-and taxpayers. In New Mexico, it costs $324 million a year to treat obesity-related illnesses, more than half of which is paid by Medicaid and Medicare. "If we don't take care of this now," Dotson warns, "it's going to cost us a lot more later."
Dire warnings about the epidemic of childhood obesity are splashed across newspapers and TV screens every day. Just last week, the national Institute of Medicine issued a report warning that 33.6 percent of US children are obese or in danger of becoming obese and that current efforts to curb the trend are insufficient. Other studies show that 25 percent of elementary school-age kids have
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high blood pressure, high cholesterol and other early warning signs of heart disease. The kind of diabetes we used to call "adult-onset" is now so common in kids that we simply call it "type 2." It's gotten so bad that kids in school today are predicted to be the first generation to die younger than their parents.
These dismal facts helped fuel the introduction of 200 laws in 42 states over the last year addressing the issue of food in schools. In New Mexico, Gov. Bill Richardson's Healthy Kids Agenda includes a variety of legislative proposals and requires school districts statewide to write Wellness Policies. The biggest changes have come from the Public Education Department, which passed a sweeping set of new rules governing so-called "competitive foods." The rules, pushed forward by a non-profit organization called New Mexico Action for Healthy Kids, ban certain foods for specific age groups and particular times of day, and require that "healthy choices" be made available. Sugary sodas and candy bars from school vending machines
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are gone, replaced by milk, water, pretzels and trail mix. They've tightened the rules about what's in the cafeteria line and insisted that healthy choices represent at least half of the food sold at fundraisers.
New Mexico's new school food policies have been lauded as the fourth best in the nation, according to the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI). But many involved agree that while eliminating bad food is a good start, schools-and parents-need to do more to teach kids positive attitudes and good habits that will keep them off the junk for good.
Public schools have offered subsidized meals that must meet
certain nutritional standards since the 1940s. While these official school lunches may not be ideal, Dotson says they're not the real problem. "We've always had USDA guidelines for lunch," the nurse explains. "We're trying to focus on everything else." Along with
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school lunches, there are individual, or "à la carte," items for sale in the cafeteria, snacks and drinks for sale in vending machines and in school stores, and other snacks sold to raise money for school activities. All of these are known as "competitive foods" because they compete with the official school lunches for kids' nutritional attention. That's dangerous because, as Dotson says, "In our state we have a big poverty problem…Sometimes the best food these kids get is at school."
Overhauling the state's vending machine offerings was a lot easier than some had predicted. When the idea was first introduced several years ago, principals and coaches were adamantly against making any changes to what had become a successful
and vital source of income for school programs. But through the efforts of groups like New Mexico Action for Healthy Kids, they came around. In Santa Fe, the district's vending machine contract expired over the summer, and district offices simply asked for the machines to be stocked with only the kinds of healthy drinks and snacks that are now required. Unfortunately, the pickings are a
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little slim. "The problem was not just that the vending machines were providing things that were not nutritionally sound, but they were providing them in serving sizes that were too big," explains Tita Gervers, the student wellness director at SFPS. So even though certain kinds of fruit juices are allowed in the machines, the sizes required aren't yet available. But Gervers is confident that companies will soon catch up and start providing acceptable products in appropriate sizes.
According to the new rules, elementary schools are allowed to sell milk, soy milk and water after lunch, but very few Santa Fe elementary schools have vending machines anyway. In middle schools, machines that once offered sodas and chips are now restricted to milk, soy milk, water, 100 percent fruit juice (if they can get it) and snacks like pretzels, trail mix and baked potato chips. High schools face the biggest challenges. They are now restricted to the same options as middle schools, except that after lunch, kids can buy sugar-free, caffeine-free sodas, sports drinks and flavored water. It's too early to say if revenue from the machines is down significantly, but PED's Kristine Meurer says, "Kids tend to buy
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what's available." She says that at her daughter's school, a milk vending machine has become so popular, they're having trouble keeping it stocked.
SFPS Associate Superintendent Terry Vaisa insists she hasn't heard any complaints from students, parents or teachers about the sudden absence of Coke, but teachers and club sponsors have been complaining to Melanie Romero, the assistant principal in charge of clubs and activities at Santa Fe High School. Student groups have traditionally relied on selling food to raise money, and they're worried that the new rules, which apply to food sold at events on and off campus, will hamper their efforts. "We've been poring over the guidelines…but right now we're not doing much fundraising because we're still trying to figure out what the requirements are," says Romero. She expects that although some of Santa Fe High's clubs will try to switch to selling healthier foods, revenues will drop.
PED's new guidelines require that food sold for fundraisers during school hours contain no more than 200 calories, 8 grams of fat or 15 grams of sugar. That eliminates many of the foods clubs
and teams have been selling. "Kids come to school hungry and they want to be able to grab a quick muffin or a burrito," Romero says, clearly frustrated.
But Dotson, who helped write the district's Wellness Policy, says, "I've looked at the list [of suggested alternatives], and it's 16 pages long!"
In school cafeterias, some à la carte items have had to be eliminated, while others have simply had to be made smaller in order to comply with new limits on fat, calories and sugar. Because
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they are regulated by the USDA, official school lunch items are not affected by PED's new rules, although lunches will soon be revamped to bring them in line with the new Dietary Guidelines for Americans (represented by the familiar food pyramid).
But so far, progress is good. Even though the new rules don't prevent parents from packing Flamin' Hot Cheetos in their kids' lunches, they have already begun to disappear. "I was at one elementary school the other day and they said in the first three weeks of school, they've only seen three bags of chips," reports Gervers. "The
important thing is that the topic is up and the conversation is happening. Children are coming up to their teachers and saying, 'Is it OK for me to eat this?' and the teachers are saying, 'Well, let's look at the label.'"
The drop in Cheetos' popularity shows Gervers that kids are taking their newfound awareness home. "It's about modeling," she says, "about educating the population as a
whole. And one of the best ways to do that is through the
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children, who take that information home and educate their parents."
Indeed, while most people would probably agree that improving what schools sell in vending machines, lunch lines and fundraisers is a big step forward, it's not enough. Even Jennie McCary from New Mexico Action for Healthy Kids admits: "We're not going to solve this problem by getting rid of junk food in schools."
For Lynn Walters, eliminating bad food without teaching kids
about good food misses the point. "We can be the food police," she says, "but unless we can really provide positive alternatives and positive reinforcement, then I think in the long term the positive efforts are lost." To fill that void, several Santa Fe programs are stepping in to educate kids about food and nutrition. With minimal funding and little staff, they
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try to get kids excited about eating right and teach them how to choose and cook with fresh ingredients.
When Walters first started working with school food, she and a few other local chefs thought they could fix school lunches by doing things like teaching the food service staff how to make dishes like
blanched green beans for the kids. "What we saw," she remembers, "is that kids who weren't used to eating those foods weren't interested. We had an immediate failure."
The green bean lesson led Walters to track down research showing that if kids take part in creating a meal, they're much more likely to be interested in eating it. So she developed Cooking with Kids, a program now operating in more than half of the city's elementary schools. Walter's curriculum exposes children to new foods in a hands-on way. "We make an effort for children to participate, look at the food, smell the food," she says, "but if they don't want to taste it, they don't have to." The element of choice is important, Walters says. You simply cannot force
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kids to try new things. But what she has seen is that most kids are interested in tasting new things, and those who are reluctant often bow to peer pressure generated by the other kids' enthusiasm.
Although it is a relatively small program that reaches only elementary students, Santa Fe's Cooking with Kids program attracted national attention this year, winning a USDA award for using innovative, collaborative methods and an integrated approach in delivering nutrition education. Because standardized tests barely cover it, teachers don't get to spend much time on nutrition education, which makes programs like Cooking with Kids especially important. Walters is
quick to say that the district has made a big commitment to improving school food, including professional development training for cafeteria workers and teachers,
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and Vaisa returns the compliment, referring to Cooking with Kids as the most important part of students' nutritional curriculum.
Unfortunately, even though it receives public and private funding, Cooking with Kids doesn't have the resources to reach every school. Most of the city's elementary students participate in tasting classes, during which they get to try foods that might be unfamiliar, like
sunflower sprouts or different varieties of locally grown apples and melons. They might also read, talk and write about Vitamin C, the history of apples or New Mexico farmers who grow them. Other elementary schools do hands-on cooking classes, making black bean tostadas with salsa fresca.
"Fifty years ago, children were learning how to cook at their mother's knee, and now that's happening less and less," Walters laments. At DeVargas Middle School, teacher Dolly Hand leads a twice-weekly club called Cooking for Fun and Health that meets after school. At her first meeting, four years ago, only one student, a boy, showed up. But now attendance averages 18 students per meeting. After several years of experience,
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Hand knows well the disconnect kids have from how their food is grown, processed and cooked. "We made popcorn one day," she recalls, "and they didn't know how to make popcorn with an air popper. They thought it was just a packet you threw in the microwave."
In a special kitchen stocked with seven stoves, DeVargas kids explore foods from different cultures and talk about nutrition. One week, Hand might lead the kids in learning how to read
nutrition labels and discussing the difference between going to McDonald's and making food at home. Another week they'll learn about diabetes and how to cook for a diabetic, which is especially important because most of the kids have a family member with the disease. Working with family members is essential, she says. "Grandmas need to know they're important," Hand believes, explaining that many times, dinner at Grandma's is one of the few
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home-cooked meals kids get. "When I first started teaching, I'd never made a flour tortilla in my life," she remembers. "But the kids brought in their aunties and grandmas, and they were totally awesome. They need to know they're valued for their expertise."
In other words, Walters says, kids' relationships to food don't exist in a vacuum. "A lot of the issues that we have with school food are due to the fact that they're a reflection of the larger
food system that we've created," says Walters. "Our dependence on [packaged foods] is dangerous," she says, because "we've lost a great deal of health and also the joy of enjoying wonderful food and having the skills to prepare food."
Connecting kids with fresh, locally grown food is one of the goals of the Farm to School program. Coordinator Betsy Torres wants kids to know that eating locally grown food is not only possible, but that "when it's picked yesterday, it tastes better." The program brings kids to the Farmer's Market so they can see new foods up close and meet some of the
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farmers. The program puts some of those local ingredients
together for special menu items in the cafeteria. "It makes more sense to them," Torres says, "when the whole process is followed and they make the connection between what they saw at the Farmer's Market and what's for lunch."
Torres is charged with buying produce from New Mexico farmers and supplying it to schools, but because of the small scale of so many farms, they don't produce enough for her to buy in the big quantities the district requires. And she must stay within the very small budget that the federal government pays for the lunches. "In my perfect world," Torres imagines, all Santa Fe schools would have "the ability
to grow a garden at the school, the kids would get to go on field trips to farms, and then we'd have that food in the cafeteria line and then they'd learn about food in class." But without funding, it will remain a dream. "The kids do enjoy it and
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they remember," she says, arguing that studying food is as important as history or algebra. "You will always have to eat," she says, "and if you don't understand food and what it's doing to your body, then where are you?"
It will probably take some time to gauge how well all of these changes are working. PED expects the schools to evaluate themselves at the end of the year, but there is no way to measure whether kids are actually getting healthier. "We can't do a very scientific study," Meurer says, "but what we can do is look at kids' attitudes and find out what kind of choices they're making." The hope is those choices will include more apples and fewer Cheetos.
