How Our Kids Are Eating

I coach a soccer team comprised of girls from Palms Elementary. We work all week to teach them about staying healthy and encouraging physical activity, and on Friday afternoons they play the other teams. After the games, various ice cream carts swoop in, and the students (and even the coaches) treat themselves to big scoops of ice cream, or corn on the cob smothered in butter, or chips and processed foods. I just want to yell at the kids, "Don't you know that 1 out of 3 of you will end up with diabetes? Don't you know how much fat and sugar and sodium those things have?" Of course, an elementary school kid would not understand those things; few of their parents even do. It is too easy to give in to a crying toddler, or a begging third grader, to just hand them the candy they want. I know my parents did that, and I'm sure I will too.

While after a soccer game on a Friday afternoon might not be the best time for a nutrition lesson, I do feel that schools are inadequate in teaching and encouraging healthy eating habits. In elementary school, lunches are comprised of foods like french fries and chicken nuggets, heavily processed and full of cheap calories. School vending machines are stocked with candy and sodas, and in the case of my middle school, donuts. The cheapest things to buy for lunch in high school are pizza and hash browns. The salads and sandwiches are at least twice as expensive. What kind of message is this sending children?

While some legislators are attempting to fix this, many of the solutions have not been working. Eliminating sodas, for example, simply led to students drinking equally sugary and fake juices. Requiring students to buy a full lunch including a main dish, two sides, and a drink, as they did at my school for a few years, led to students buying a piece of pizza, two bags of cookies, and a can of fruit juice with thirty grams of sugar rather than the lone slice of pizza they would've bought. Finding ways to encourage kids to eat better and teaching nutrition in class are two ways for schools to improve in this area. While I was educated in things such as the food pyramid, I was never taught about processed foods or the impacts of eating meat.

One things schools are afraid of is being "biased." Statements about healthy eating are seen as an attempt to convince good, American meat eaters to join some crazy, leftist commune of vegans. One of the hardest parts I have found about being vegetarian is telling people about it without provoking a defensive rant. Any explanation of why I pursue a vegetarian diet is not seen as a defense or a statement of facts, but as an attempt to convert others. Schools have to strike a balance; if they focus too much on eating healthily, they risk alienating and upsetting parents who don't want that "agenda" taught to their kids. If schools don't teach students how to eat right, we will have a future generation of fat and diabetic Americans.