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Childhood obesity and fast food
Childhood obesity and fast food
Healthier school lunches essay
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When you send your children off to school, you might worry about bullying or about their academic performance, but you generally don’t consider their lunch-time meal to be a potential problem. Now imagine, for a moment, your son or daughter is given the option between a juicy cheeseburger with greasy French fries and a healthier chicken salad. It’s a no-brainer what choice they will make. Now, stop imagining because you don’t have to. Instances like this are a reality everyday in many school cafeterias. In 2005, John Esterbrook, a writer for CBS News, reported on a government survey showing that junk foods are in competition with healthy counterparts in nine out of ten schools (par. 1). Today, although four years later, little improvement has been made to ensure students in schools are eating healthy. Why is this a problem? You may want to think that there is a simple, clear-cut line between junk food and healthy food, but as schools work to keep costs down, many corners are cut and it becomes hard to decipher what really is healthy. Confusing elements like transfat, carbohydrates, preservatives, daily percentages, and other factors only provide complications in defining healthy food. Furthermore, even if you explicitly label foods as healthy or unhealthy, hungry students are not going to consider their health as their first priority when making a quick decision of what to eat. School cafeterias, through the support of legislation, school administration, and parents, should be providing students with healthy, natural food options in contrast to the very unhealthy, processed foods that many schools currently provide. It is easy to say junk food is bad, but understanding the effects of junk food on students allows for an ... ... middle of paper ... ...9. . Kelleher, Jennifer S. "USDA may regulate all food sold in schools." Newsday.com. Newsday, 7 July 2009. Web. 5 Nov. 2009. . Paton, Graeme. "Too much fast food 'harms children's test scores'" Telegraph. Telegraph Media Group Limited, 22 May 2009. Web. 5 Nov. 2009. . "Selling Obesity at School." Editorial. New York Times 26 Apr. 2009. The New York Times Company. Web. 5 Nov. 2009. . "Study: Kids will eat healthy school food." USA Today. USA TODAY, 25 Nov. 2007. Web. 5 Nov. 2009. .
Obesity in the United States, which the media has labeled a national crisis, has also been connected to poverty rates. Big fast food industry’s target poor communities, and spend millions of dollars each year to create advertising that appeals to these specific areas. These industry’s also target naïve children when advertising because they know that eating habits developed in childhood are usually carried into adulthood. Children who are exposed to television advertisements for unhealthy food and who are not educated well enough on good nutrition will grow up and feed their families the same unhealthy foods they ate as kids. A big way fast food giants are able to make certain young people have access to unhealthy food is by strategically placing franchises in close proximity to schools. They will often place three times as many outlets within walking distance of schools than in areas where there are no schools nearby. The way fast food advertising is targeted towards children is very alarming considering how important good nutrition is for young people and how a child’s eating habits can affect their growth and
Crouse, Janice Shaw. "The Fast-Food Industry Intentionally Markets Unhealthy Food to Children." Fast Food. Ed. Tracy Brown Collins. San Diego: Greenhaven Press, 2009. At Issue. Gale Opposing Viewpoints In Context. Web. 14 Apr. 2011.
Zhao, Emmeline. "School Lunch Rules For Healthier Meals Get Mixed Reviews From Students." The Huffington Post. TheHuffingtonPost.com, 14 Sept. 2012. Web. 26 Apr. 2014.
Government date shows that in the past thirty years, rate of being overweight in six to eleven year olds is up 19% and 6% in age 12 to 19. Without support, school lunches remain high in fat. (Finkelstien) According to the CDCP, obesity is double what it was in children and triple in adolescents since 1980. Many reforms were attempted to help this problem, but many inadvertently caused more problems. (Finkelstien) A 730 calorie lunch should have no more than 24 grams of fat and no more than 8 grams of it saturated yet the average USDA lunch has 31 grams of fat and 14 rams of it is saturated. (Yeoman) These very high levels of fat are why obesity is becoming worse in children. It can be concluded that school food is still extremely high in fat and this can be directly linked to the high rates of obesity in young children and
Food To Students." Points Of View: Junk Food In Schools (2013): 2. Points of View
Press, The Associated. “Some Schools Drop Out of New Healthy Federal Lunch Program, Citing Small Portions and Foods Kids Won’t Eat.” New York Daily News, August 28, 2013. http://www.nydailynews.com/life-style/health/schools-drop-new-healthy-federal-lunch-program-article-1.1439576
According to the Centers for Disease Control, “Childhood obesity has more than doubled in children and quadrupled in adolescents in the past 30 years,” meaning that America’s children need to start eating healthier, including healthier school lunches. The National School Lunch Act is a fairly recent addition to American society. For, as the world waged war a second time, the United States began to worry about the strength and health of the country’s soldiers. However, in the beginning, selling excess agricultural goods was more important than building a healthy, well-balanced meal for students. Unfortunately, many children coming from poorer families could not afford well-balanced school lunches, so in order to compensate, the School Lunch Program changed its focus to help these students. This program, however, decreased schools’ lunch budgets, and schools had a hard time keeping up with the amount of free meals they had to provide, so they came up with some extra ways to increase revenue. However, in a small town in Massachusetts, one chef makes a difference in the health of the school lunch students eat each day, and proves that hiring a trained chef to cook real, healthy meals can increase profit. Unfortunately, that is not the case in most schools across the nation. The quality of health of the food being served in school lunches is extremely poor and was allowed to decline even more with a new set of rule changes. However, there are some improvements currently being made to increase the quality of health of the food being served to students, including teaching them all about food and its nutritional information, both good and bad. In order for students to eat healthier lunches at school, the USDA needs to implement healthier ...
Holguin, Jaime. "Fast Food Linked To Child Obesity."CBSNEWS. CBS Interactive Inc., 05 Jan 2004. Web. 14 Jan 2014. .
Unfortunately, in today’s society, school administrators focus heavily on standardized test scores and school rankings thus adding more pressure on students and teachers. This being said, schools have begun to focus on providing healthy foods because they help increase a person’s cognitive and critical thinking ability. It is seen that nutrition plays a great role in students’ performance on exams and physical activity due to the correlation between school provided meals and low student
First of all, an increasing amount of kids are becoming overweight because their schools pressure them to eat sugary, fatty, and high-calorie foods. Not only do many schools promote consumption of harmful foods, many schools also actively serve them in school lunches. In 1963, 4% of kids were obese; currently, approximately 17% of kids are obese. Some might argue that kids themselves are the reason for the increase, because school lunches also provide healthier foods. Unfortunately, most kids do not have much of a choice - healthier foods are priced much higher than their unhealthy counterpart, consequently many parents do not want their kids to buy the more expensive, yet healthier product. In my 3½ years ...
The majority of foods in the schools around the United States are junk food. The food a child consumes at a school is usually fattening and can lead to diseases mentioned before. Another problem with a child not eating properly is not receiving the vitamins and minerals he/ she desires. A change that was made to provide healthy lunches is to give the students one cup of fruits and a decent meal size. Schuna has done research as to why the lunches are a major health concern and she discusses ways to resolve and/ or prevent these health issues.
To conclude, unhealthy foods in the cafeteria and the vending machines are the worst examples for the kids to maintain the healthy eating habits. Us Parents have to step in to make changes for our kids because in doing so would determine what kind of foods our kids are consuming. We do know for facts they are not getting the proper nutrients while in school, although they do spend in average of eight to 12 hours in schools. We, the parents, can start to make a difference, by attending the school meetings and being active in our kids functions in schools.
Holguin, Jaime. “Fast Food Linked To Child Obesity.” Cbsnews.com. CBS News, 5 Jan. 2003. Web. 8 May 2011.
First of all, students aren’t motivated to eat unhealthy, not-tasty food. If you observed students buying lunch in the cafeteria, you don’t often see them buying these kinds, but not limited to, foodstuffs: burritos (which are just beans wrapped in tortillas), “burgers” (meat slapped on two slices of bread), etc. Even the chicken nuggets aren’t very popular. And the prices! $3.75-$4.75 is not worth such “garbahge”, as a teacher would say. Out of the twenty five students I surveyed, 56% stated that they would like to see their cafeteria changed. The reasons being were, “The same stuff everyday – it gets boring”, “Tastes like plastic”, ...
Schools are spending too much on subjects or activities that don’t influence children’s future as much as quality food. Reprioritizing the way schools spend money can help free up funds for healthier lunches. Schools don’t only hold the proverbial lighter in this wild fire, so do parents. Parents need to get involved. They need to serve healthy food at home, exposure to healthy foods should start with things such as planting a garden at home if possible. The facts are simple. Students should be taught to eat healthy, shown to eat healthy, and given the opportunity to eat healthy. In that case, the issue will almost certainly work itself out with everyone involved parents, students, schools, and the