The always feisty Center For Science In The Public Interest has released a school lunch report card and while no state received an “A”, only Kentucky and Oregon are close to the CSPI’s standards. Oregon went from an F to an A-, but it wasn’t easy:
“You would think that with all the concern about childhood obesity that getting junk food and soda out of schools would be easy. But, it took us six years of hard work to pass our school nutrition legislation,” said Mary Lou Hennrich, executive director of the Community Health Partnership: Oregon’s Public Health Institute, who led Oregon’s effort to improve school foods. “We welcome national action to build on what we and other states have done and ensure that all children go to school in junk-food-free environments.”
Here’s the report card:
A- Kentucky (1), Oregon (2)
B+ Nevada (3), Alabama (4), Arkansas (5), California (6),Washington (6), New Mexico (7)
B New Jersey (8), Arizona (9), Tennessee (9)
B- Louisiana (10), Texas (11),,West Virginia (12), Connecticut (13), Rhode Island (14), Florida (15)
C+ Hawaii (16)
C Maine (17), Mississippi (18), Illinois (19), District of Columbia (20)
C- Colorado (21), South Carolina (22)
D+ New York (23), Maryland (24), North Carolina (25)
D Oklahoma (26), Virginia (27)
D- Indiana (28), Georgia (29)
F Alaska, Delaware, Idaho, Iowa, Kansas, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, New Hampshire, North Dakota, Ohio, Pennsylvania, South Dakota, Utah, Vermont, Wisconsin, Wyoming (All ranked 30)
The states which received an F have only the standard USDA guidelines, which the CSPI argues are “woefully out of date” because the USDA doesn’t have the power to regulate foods that are sold outside of meal times (there is a national regulation that requires all schools to turn off their soft drink machines during lunch periods.)
The policy the CSPI rated #1 came from Kentucky and contains some fairly strict rules. No foods or beverages can be sold outside of the school lunch program until 1/2 hour after lunch periods end. No whole milk is allowed, only fat free or 1%. Water is allowed if it is noncaloric and un-carbonated. Only 100% juices are allowed. No sweetened beverages with more than 10 grams of sugar. No portion sizes over 17 oz for elementary schools, 20 oz for junior and senior high, and so on. There are portion controls on the menu items and sodium limits galore. Schools must limit sale of outside fast food (McDonald’s, Taco Bell, etc.) to no more than once a week.
We think the “no whole milk” rule is a bit draconian. Then again, when we were in high school they served Pizza Hut every other day, so perhaps our idea of what is normal is irrevocably skewed.
School Foods Report Card 2007 (PDF) [Center For Science In The Public Interest]
(Photo:greencandy8888)
More From Consumerist
-
Passenger Says TSA Handled Her Feeding Tube During Strip Search
-
NYC’s Mayor Bloomberg Locking Up Baby Formula At Hospitals To Encourage Breastfeeding
-
FDA: We Can't Prove Chinese Jerky Killed Hundreds Of Dogs, But Maybe Avoid It Anyway
-
Dying Woman Says TSA Humiliated Her By Refusing To Perform Search In Private
-
Study Says All Your Snuffling & Sneezing Could Give Mr. Whiskers McKittyton The Flu
@BaysideWrestling: Maybe where you live, but not here. Kids buying a standard lunch (which is all they can get if they’re on free/reduced lunch) get a milk AND an orange juice.
@ceejeemcbeegee: I agree that a school is only 1/3 of the package. But, the reality is that it’s often the most responsible third. Parents are doing the best they know how, but that’s not always the best their children deserve. Schools have a responsibility to step up where possible. Reasonable lunches are within that “where possible” range.
By the way, anyone wanting a glimpse into the twisted brains of parents and cafeteria food should check out Jamie Olliver’s School Lunch Program (TLC). Parents began a virtual underground railroad so hat kids could buy crap instead of the healthy school lunches.
Ouch, my bones are so brittle but I’ve been drinking plenty of…Malk? [Now with Vitamin R]
@Adam291: That’s faulty logic. Perhaps states with the highest obesity rates felt a stronger need to go in and change their lunch plans. While states with lower rates of obesity felt they had less of a problem and therefore no need to change anything. It will take years before we will see the effects (if any) of healthier school lunch programs on obesity rates.
I forgot to say what I thought first. Texas=B-?! Really??? Well that says a lot. I’ve seen what they serve at Texas public schools in the last couple of years (it hasn’t changed from when I was in school 13+ years ago) and if that’s a B- then I shudder to think what’s an F!
@witeowl: Seriously? Teachers should be more responsible for people they didn’t procreate? That’s just…not right. They should be equally responsible, but not more so.
ALRIGHT NEW YORK!!!!!!
institutions don’t know anything about nutrition. they know what kids want, which is never really healthy.
I’m from Indiana, and I can definitely understand why we got a D-! We had a variety of menus, I think their goal was usually to repeat food no more than once or twice a month, something like that (throughout middle and high school). The problem was that, even at my little schools (HS of about 600 students), if you didn’t want the “meal” (tray with the “healthy” food), you could instead just buy chips, a pretzel w/ cheese, nachos, etc. They had some apples, but they were usually mealy, so the Pop-Tarts and Hostess always won.
A year into high school, they got a new cook. He ushed in the “we heat up frozen, pre-cooked food, not cook some of the food from scratch” era. Teachers complained about that one.
@goodkitty: outside? Hah! Anyway, what good will that do when they are trying to digest processed pizza, veggie oil with fake cheese flavoring, over-processed bread, and sodas? It will probably just make them gain weight as badly as being sedentary.
It’s sad they cut costs there so much. While it would require some cost, and actual skilled labor, it should be very easy for a school cafeteria to serve nearly-from-scratch, healthy meals, that also happen to be delicious.
Yes, I went to one school where they made good food in the cafeteria.
OTOH, it’s more a symptom than an issue that can be fixed by itself. Getting parents more involved, culling administrative positions, allowing disruptive kids to just plain get kicked out, etc., would go a long way.
@ceejeemcbeegee: How can you have any pudding if you don’t eat yer meat?!
Oh, and I broke my arm from being reckless with playground equipment. Nobody got sued. I guess I should have had greedier parents, huh?
@BaysideWrestling: Let them drink Coke (for the caffeine-deprived: think cake).
@phantomfly: Not to mention the fact that eating a “low fat” diet that’s high in sugar, HFCS, MSG, etc. still leads to putting on body fat. The link between dietary fat intake and body fat production is tenuous at best and it’s practically impossible to test in isolation. I’m more fit than ever eating a higher fat diet (meat, avocados, nuts, olive oil) that’s lower in sugar and simple starch. For more info on all this check out Gary Taubes, “Lights Out: Sleep, Sugar, and Survival”, and “The Omnivore’s Dilemma”
A tip for those states that want to score an A: DON’T SERVE ANY FOOD! Seriously, no food, no vending machines, nothing. Make the parents and kids be responsible for their own lunches. It seriously can’t get any worse in terms of nutrition.
@fluiddruid: “Is there a good reason that young children (not teens) should only have 1%? Lowfat diets are not appropriate for growing children without weight problems.”
According to my nutrition class, medical and federal guidelines DO suggest teenagers be on 2% or skim milk; whole milk is only appropriate up through about age 5 for a normal healthy child; after that they should be on 2%, and switch to skim in their teens. With, of course, appropriate adjustments for individual children and individual situations.
@RvLeshrac: “But wait, what about those people who can eat three pizzas at every meal and never gain an ounce? There are a lot of them.”
It’s still not GOOD for them. They can either be low-quality-calorie-ing themselves into nutritional deficiencies, or they can face the fact, when their metabolism inevitably slows down with age, that they’ve never learned how to eat correctly. Eating habits learned as a child and teenager are very difficult to break.
@czarandy: “Is there evidence that what you eat at school actually affects your future health? Or do they just make this up?”
ENORMOUSLY affects. Teenagers in particular can eat themselves into nutritional deficiencies, even if they’re getting adequate food at home. (A very typical pattern is skipping breakfast, eating a crap school lunch, and a good dinner, but a good dinner isn’t nearly enough in terms of vitamins and minerals to make up for the deficiencies the rest of the day.) For children in from poor families, school lunches can spell the difference between developmental delays and abnormalities due to malnutrition and normal development. (What children eat also plays an enormous role in how they perform at school; chronic bad nutrition, or even just chronic breakfast-skipping, correlates directly to lower grades and behavioral problems, so four years of bad eating in high school could quite clearly affect college admissions.)
In a larger sense, the way people eat as children and then learn to eat when first eating “independently” as teenagers is how they eat the rest of their lives, and those patterns are extremely difficult to break.
Moreover, and for everyone saying “parents should take care of it” — most parents DO NOT KNOW how to feed their children healthfully; only 19% of elementary and junior high students eat nutritionally adequate (adequate, not stellar) diets. Nutrition HAS to be taught in schools, both in the hopes children will take that information home to their parents, and in the hopes children will grow up with that information and be able to better feed themselves and their own children.
@ceejeemcbeegee:
We are not going to get anywhere with curbing the childhood obesity epidemic unless schools start serving only healthy food (that tastes good) and teaching kids good eating habits from preschool. There is a certain responsibility that the school has to take, imagine being a parent trying to instill good eating habits in your kids so that they don’t turn into the Goodyear blimp and then having them go to school and all that is thrown out the window when they school feeds them nothing but greasy food loaded with calories and fat. Its even harder if you have “fat genes” in your family and you are trying to teach your kids good eating habits so their chances of getting obese and getting diseases such as diabetes are lessened.
I totally agree that playgrounds need to come back and they need to be bigger and better than they were in the 80s. This is a point I am continualy trying to make. Our kids cannot excercise if there is no place FUN for them to excercise, and I am not talking about Chuck E Cheese here. Almost all the playground equipment in our town is gone and there was a ton of it when I was a kid, and it is now replaced with one plastic play structure that can hold maybe 2 of today’s sized kids max. No wonder the obesity rate is up. There is literatly no where to take your kids to play around here nowadays, unless you want to hit Chuck E Cheese or the local amusement park both which serve nothing but unhealthy food and do not allow outside food into their establishments. Even then amusement parks are only open in the summer here due to the northeast climate, so we could really benefit from some indoor play places here, there’s just nothing to do in the winter. I really pity the parents who live around here and are trying to raise their kids to be healthy.
Schools should make recess a part of the daily routine again and gym class should be every day for 30 min or more (instead of once a week), instead of practically tying every kid down to their chair and making them study all day long and cramming more and more into their brains. They need to get all that excess energy out too. Gym class should also be made fun again where you play games and stuff and not making kids run laps because no one can be left behind like it is done now. No kid wants to run laps. This is half of the reason kids are so against excercising nowadays, the schools make it feel like work. If excercise is made FUN again kids wouldn’t shun the idea so much, they would enjoy doing it, and it wouldn’t even feel like work.
I guess I’m going to have to put the blame on parents for this. From kindergarten up to grade 9, I ate lunch at home. For high school, I went to a different school and didn’t go home for lunch. Once a week at the most, I ate what the school offered for lunch. I’m not obese. I would have to say that 90% of my schoolmates shared the same lifestyle. I think there were 2 or 3 kids I went to school with that were overweight but it seemed to be genetic (the whole family was large). If parents would take the time to make their kids a decent lunch, it wouldn’t, again, be the government’s problem to take care of their kids.
@dazette: What does “junk science” mean? I’ve never heard it as anything but code for “pesky scientists meddling with industry’s God-given right to do whatever they can get away with”.
Granted, CSPI has a vegetarian bias, and their nutrition standards are a little stricter (not different, just stricter) than the norm. But then, look how abysmal the norm is. I’m still happy to hear from CSPI as a counterweight to industry propaganda.
I’d like to take away the limit on whole milk, but would prefer organic. Toxins build up in the fats so if non-organic avoiding animal fats is a good policy. Also, would love to see school programs start a garden program where the kids can learn about growing things and then the produce would be available to eat.
@SaraAB87: “Gym class should also be made fun again where you play games and stuff and not making kids run laps because no one can be left behind like it is done now. No kid wants to run laps. This is half of the reason kids are so against excercising nowadays, the schools make it feel like work. If excercise is made FUN again kids wouldn’t shun the idea so much, they would enjoy doing it, and it wouldn’t even feel like work.”
Good point. My high school (in a small town with no specially rich tax base, just a commitment to doing things right) had a fantastic gym program, with two or three activities to choose from each quarter so that almost everybody could find something to like, even the kids like me who didn’t like games. I picked up a lifelong passion for cross-country skiing from those classes. We had the traditional activities like running and basketball, but we also had tennis, swimming, archery, hiking, weightlifting, and aerobics (nowadays I’m pretty sure they would make an effort to offer something like yoga or Pilates). It was a great way to extend the benefits of gym beyond the natural athletes who have always been good at gym.
I love how people think the availability of healthy food is the answer.
You know you can send a text message to Papa Johns and they’ll deliver, right?
I’m stunned Arizona got a B. The only thing that was remotely edible in my jr. high and high school time here was the overly greasy clear-paper pizza, with some fries that were soggy from too much time in the grease. If I didn’t want that, well, there were plenty of undercooked hamburgers and old chicken nuggets.
i ate pop tarts, cheetos, and diet coke for lunch most days in high school, and i wasn’t overweight (and, magically, i’m still not–even though i continue to eat pretty poorly). i even ran varsity track and cross-country in high school–but i might’ve been a better athlete if i’d improved my nutrition.
point being, healthy food is great, but being active is just as important (if not more so). in my high school, we actually weren’t *allowed* to go outside for lunch to run around or play sports (a high school version of “recess,” if you will). we had to remain in the cafeteria until the lunch period was over. if i *hadn’t* been running so much outside of school, i probably would have been pretty chubby, considering my insane eating habits and the school’s unwillingness to let us go outside.
ultimately, even if you eat (relatively) healthfully, sitting in a desk for 8 hours a day (at work or at school) is a great way to get fat. activity level is just as much a health consideration as food intake.
@testsicles: That’s assuming Papa John’s is allowed onto campus and/or the kids are allowed to leave campus. My high school neither was allowed. “Moonlighting” police officers were stationed around the school, especially during lunch and after to make sure no one got in or out that shouldn’t. Yep. It was a little island police state.
Good to know that my state’s D-
Which reminds me–my friend, back in high school, found a cockroach in smack middle of a cheeseburger that cafeteria served for lunch. He ate what wasn’t touched by the corpse, went back to serving line, and asked for a new cheeseburger. They gave it to him.
Eew.
@synergy: I’m sorry, but I’m positive I didn’t use the word teacher. I said schools need to step up where possible. Schools are an extension of society. I also didn’t say that schools should be more responsible; I said that they should step up when parents are unable (due to ignorance or other) to do right by their children.
Somehow, people seem to have the idea that other people’s kids are other people’s problems. It’s not true. This is not just because of the village-to-raise-a-child truth, but it’s also for the sake of self-interest.
Not only do I want all children educated in general so that we have more professionals than criminals, but I also want children provided (and modeled) proper nutrition and health habits so we have more athletes than diabetics.
FWIW, I just realized that you may have misunderstood my phrase “most responsible third”. In that phrase, I was using ‘responsible’ as having good judgment or sound thinking, not as liable. But, I spent too much time on this response, so I’m not deleting.
@SaraAB87: Ooh, good point. Not only are we failing the children whose parents are poor or reckless, but we’re also undercutting the effectiveness of the parents who are trying to do right by their children.
Yep, either way you stack it, we’re blowing it.
@chili_dog: I agree. CSPI can eat my butt.
Here’s an article from, you know, an actual nutritionist (the kind with a degree in nutrition) about feeding children (pdf file.)
[www.ellynsatter.com]
@peggynature: Yeah, because weight control is the only issue that matters when discussing the health and nutrition of our children.
/sarcasm off
The gods know I’m not talking about food restriction and shaming kids into weight loss. I’m talking about healthful food choices.
Also, for anyone screaming “civil rights”: these aren’t civil rights issues and children don’t have the same rights as adults. If they did, school wouldn’t be compulsory and they could drink whiskey at twelve.
@csdiego:
“Junk Science” is scientific research which adheres to scientific principles, but does not meet “your” [whoever 'you' is] pre-existing biases.
“Junk Science” differs from “Bad Science” in that while “Junk Science” is simply guilty of not coming to the ‘right’ conclusion (aspartame is safe, legalized abortion results in a drop in crime rates, boys and girls learn differently and prefer different subjects), “Bad Science” uses logical fallacies, poor (or no) controls, improperly designed experiments, or outright lies in order to prove a pre-existing conclusion (forcing the data to meet the hypothesis; ‘homeopathy works,’ ‘intelligent design theory,’ ‘psychic powers are real,’ ‘second-hand smoke is definitively harmful,’ the Wirth-Lobo prayer study).
There’s no standard definition for “Junk Science,” however, and it is often used in place of “Bad Science.” All scientific research is “Junk Science” until it is peer-reviewed and the results are replicated, but not all “Junk Science” is “Bad Science” in the same way that not all asians are hyperintelligent, not all blacks are criminals, and not all whites are smart or rich.
@witeowl:
True, but school lunch programs have to be sustainable and the nutrition levels must be based on a standard. If the USDA nutritional guidelines are wrong, we need to research and implement new standards according to the results of good research – not simply implement programs based on what some organization or another ‘feels good’ about.