Child-friendly, healthy and truly delicious food can be served in school lunchrooms: that’s what I learned at “Take a Bite out of Childhood Obesity”, a briefing on the Child Nutrition Reauthorization Act sponsored by the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine (PCRM). Held at Canon House on Capitol Hill, the event on February 26th was almost too good to be true; for the first time ever, I was able to go to an professional event I was actually able to eat at, as it was exclusively catered by Gail’s, a local vegetarian/vegan catering company. Mock egg salad sandwiches, low-fat guacamole, hummus and fruit kabobs were only some of the tasty samples there to convince us how easy it is to eat healthy and cheap. The Child Nutrition Reauthorization Act is an opportunity to prove these claims and make them a reality.
Dr. Neal Barnard, President of PCRM, was only one of three speakers to deliver an extremely convincing talk on how to reverse America’s childhood obesity epidemic by prioritizing fresh fruit, vegetables and whole grains in schools. In addition, the PCRM is stressing the need for dairy-free options on lunch menus. Dairy is currently the highest source of fat in children’s diets today. In addition, 90% of Native Americans and Asians, 70% of African-Americans, 50% of Latinos and 15% of White people suffer from some form of lactose intolerance; a fact schools choose to ignore completely.
Since the 1950s, consumption of meat (since the first wave of factory farms), cheese (since the advent of take-out pizza), and sugar (in the form of High Fructose Corn Syrup) have skyrocketed along side obesity rates and its related diseases, causing children today to be in the worst shape than any previous generation in our country. The estimated lifetime risk for individuals born in 2000 to contract Type 2 Diabetes (a disease doctors generally treated patients aged 30 or more for) is 32.8% for men and 38.5% for women. Due to widespread unhealthiness, boys will lose 11.6 years from our current life expectancy rates and girls will lose 14.3 years.
Like the food served at the talk, the panelists showed how easy it is to introduce tasty, complete meals into school meas. Cost-neutral options that haven successfully tested included veggie burgers, vegetarian chili, and roasted vegetable whole-grain pizza, only to name a few of the many choices widely approved by students in public schools all across the country. Such claims came in drastic contrast to those made by the panelists of the Institute of Medicine’s public forum held in February, that children never choose the healthier options when presented with them in school.
Private schools everywhere have already caught on to the need to satisfy the demands of a growing number of children opting for alternatives diets. If vegetarians options and dairy-free substitutes are good enough for children in schools including Sidwell Friends, attended by our President’s own children, they should be good enough for all our children. Are public school children less deserving of healthy meals than private school children? Have they less need to benefit from healthy meals?
Ms. Eboni Morris of the National Urban League also presented frightening data based on a case study on Washington DC’s Ward 8, our nation’s capitol’s most food insecure area. What was most alarming about Ms. Morris’ discussion was not simply the complete lack of fresh food accessibility in Ward 8 nor was it the neighborhood children’s reliance on soft drinks and junk food as the staples of their diet, it was the undeniable parallel that can be drawn between the diet of our District’s poorest and most disenfranchised ward to the ‘food’ our government is consciously choosing to feed our children every day. How can our government claim it is making efforts to feed our children healthy foods when kids are forced to eat high-sodium, high-sugar, processed foods, with no other options available? Our current school meal system is as inadequate to feed our youth as the government is to provide areas like Ward 8 with decent access to nutritious food.
Dr. Robert Lawrence from the Center for a Livable Future emphasized that children are currently consuming too many ‘empty calories’ of little nutrient value. As he stated, “we are fed by a food system that knows nothing about health, and we are cared for by a system that knows nothing about food.” Stressing the talk’s emphasis on a need for healthier options in school meals, he highlighted the need to develop Farm to School programs across the nation and that federal aid had to play a role in bolstering these initiatives and other innovative programs.
Though Dr. Barnard and his fellow speakers presented vital information in Congress last Thursday, they did so in front of a disappointingly empty room. Why is no one listening? Why are children’s health issues and our federally funded school meal programs being swept under the table by our government? Though major agro-industry lobbyists eagerly flocked to the Institute of Medicine’s recent public forum to gather information on how to make their next moves, none of them found it worthwhile to listen to our nation’s very own doctors on how to improve child nutrition. Dr. Barnard did have a very simple answer as to why so little is being done to change our nation’s food system; it is because more often than not, when it comes to food issues, “the forces of darkness are stronger than anything else.”
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OCA at PCRM's Take a Bite Out of Childhood Obesity
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Child Nutrition Act Reauthorization
Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine's Capitol Hill Briefing
By Chantal Clement
Organic Consumers Association, March 3, 2009
Straight to the Source
