Healthier schools: Goodbye candy and greasy snacks

WASHINGTON (AP) — Good­bye candy bars and sug­ary cook­ies. Hello baked chips and diet sodas.

The gov­ern­ment for the first time is propos­ing broad new stan­dards to make sure all foods sold in schools are more health­ful, a change that would ban the sale of almost all candy, high-calorie sports drinks and greasy foods on campus.

Under new rules the Depart­ment of Agri­cul­ture pro­posed Fri­day, school vend­ing machines would start sell­ing water, lower-calorie sports drinks, diet sodas and baked chips instead. Lunch­rooms that now sell fatty “a la carte” items like moz­zarella sticks and nachos would have to switch to health­ier piz­zas, low-fat ham­burg­ers, fruit cups and yogurt.

The rules, required under a child nutri­tion law passed by Con­gress in 2010, are part of the government’s effort to com­bat child­hood obe­sity. While many schools already have made improve­ments in their lunch menus and vend­ing machine choices, oth­ers still are sell­ing high-fat, high-calorie foods.

Under the pro­posal, the Agri­cul­ture Depart­ment would set fat, calo­rie, sugar and sodium lim­its on almost all foods sold in schools. Cur­rent stan­dards already reg­u­late the nutri­tional con­tent of school break­fasts and lunches that are sub­si­dized by the fed­eral gov­ern­ment, but most lunch rooms also have “a la carte” lines that sell other foods. And food sold through vend­ing machines and in other ways out­side the lunch­room has not been fed­er­ally regulated.

“Par­ents and teach­ers work hard to instill healthy eat­ing habits in our kids, and these efforts should be sup­ported when kids walk through the school­house door,” said Agri­cul­ture Sec­re­tary Tom Vilsack.

Most snacks sold in school would have to have less than 200 calo­ries. Ele­men­tary and mid­dle schools could sell only water, low-fat milk or 100 per­cent fruit or veg­etable juice. High schools could sell some sports drinks, diet sodas and iced teas, but the calo­ries would be lim­ited. Drinks would be lim­ited to 12-ounce por­tions in mid­dle schools, and 8-ounce por­tions in ele­men­tary schools.

The stan­dards will cover vend­ing machines, the “a la carte” lunch lines, snack bars and any other foods reg­u­larly sold around school. They would not apply to in-school fundrais­ers or bake sales, though states have the power to reg­u­late them. The new guide­lines also would not apply to after-school con­ces­sions at school games or the­ater events, good­ies brought from home for class­room cel­e­bra­tions, or any­thing stu­dents bring for their own per­sonal consumption.

The new rules are the lat­est in a long list of changes designed to make foods served in schools more health­ful and acces­si­ble. Nutri­tional guide­lines for the sub­si­dized lunches were revised last year and put in place last fall. The 2010 child nutri­tion law also pro­vided more money for schools to serve free and reduced-cost lunches and required more meals to be served to hun­gry kids.

Iowa Sen. Tom Harkin, a Demo­c­rat, has been work­ing for two decades to take junk foods out of schools. He calls the avail­abil­ity of unhealth­ful foods around cam­pus a “loop­hole” that under­mines the tax­payer money that helps pay for the health­ier sub­si­dized lunches.

“USDA’s pro­posed nutri­tion stan­dards are a crit­i­cal step in clos­ing that loop­hole and in ensur­ing that our schools are places that nur­ture not just the minds of Amer­i­can chil­dren but their bod­ies as well,” Harkin said.

Last year’s rules faced crit­i­cism from some con­ser­v­a­tives, includ­ing some Repub­li­cans in Con­gress, who said the gov­ern­ment shouldn’t be telling kids what to eat. Mind­ful of that back­lash, the Agri­cul­ture Depart­ment exempted in-school fundrais­ers from fed­eral reg­u­la­tion and pro­posed dif­fer­ent options for some parts of the rule, includ­ing the calo­rie lim­its for drinks in high schools, which would be lim­ited to either 60 calo­ries or 75 calo­ries in a 12-ounce portion.

The depart­ment also has shown a will­ing­ness to work with schools to resolve com­plaints that some new require­ments are hard to meet. Last year, for exam­ple, the gov­ern­ment relaxed some lim­its on meats and grains in sub­si­dized lunches after school nutri­tion­ists said they weren’t working.

Schools, the food indus­try, inter­est groups and other crit­ics or sup­port­ers of the new pro­posal will have 60 days to com­ment and sug­gest changes. A final rule could be in place as soon as the 2014 school year.

Margo Wootan, a nutri­tion lob­by­ist for the Cen­ter for Sci­ence in the Pub­lic Inter­est, says sur­veys done by her orga­ni­za­tion show that most par­ents want changes in the lunchroom.

“Par­ents aren’t going to have to worry that kids are using their lunch money to buy candy bars and a Gatorade instead of a healthy school lunch,” she said.

The food indus­try has been onboard with many of the changes, and sev­eral com­pa­nies worked with Con­gress on the child nutri­tion law two years ago. Major bev­er­age com­pa­nies have already agreed to take the most caloric sodas out of schools. But those same com­pa­nies, includ­ing Coca-Cola and Pep­siCo, also sell many of the non-soda options, like sports drinks, and have lob­bied to keep them in vend­ing machines.

A spokes­woman for the Amer­i­can Bev­er­age Asso­ci­a­tion, which rep­re­sents the soda com­pa­nies, says they already have greatly reduced the num­ber of calo­ries kids are con­sum­ing at school by pulling out the high-calorie sodas.

Posted by Matt Echelberry on Feb 1 2013. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.