New USDA rules would remove junk food from school vending machines
Students at McLean High School in McLean, Virginia, purchase snacks at a vending machine on school property Dec. 15 2005. / PAUL J.RICHARDS/AFP/Getty Images
WASHINGTON In order to ensure there is healthier food on school campuses, the government is proposing new standards on school snacks. If passed, students may have to say bye to sugar-filled candy, high-calorie sports drinks and greasy dishes.
USDA school lunch changes: What's on the menu?
Under new rules the Department of Agriculture proposed Friday, school vending machines that once were full of Skittles and Sprite would instead be selling water, lower-calorie sports drinks, diet sodas and baked chips. Lunch rooms that now sell fatty "a la carte" items like mozzarella sticks and nachos would have to transition to healthier pizzas, fruit cups and yogurt.
The move comes a little more than a year after First lady Michelle Obama and Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack announced new measures to make school lunches healthier for students as part of the National School Lunch and School Breakfast programs.
The rules, required under a child nutrition law passed by Congress called the "Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act of 2010" are an effort to combat childhood obesity. While many schools have already made improvements in their lunch menus and vending machine choices, others are still selling high-fat, high-calorie foods.
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The USDA is now proposing fat, calorie, sugar and sodium limits on almost all foods sold in school. In addition, the agency wants to provide healthier snack foods consisting of whole grains, low fat dairy, fruits, vegetables or proteins. Beverage portion size and caffeine content will also be controlled according to age group.
"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 contain less than 200 calories, and elementary and middle schools would have to only sell water, low-fat milk or 100 percent fruit or vegetable juice. High schools could sell some sports drinks, but the calories would be limited.
The standards will cover vending machines, the "a la carte" lunch lines and any other foods regularly sold around school. The proposed rules would not cover in-school fundraisers or bake sales, though states could decide to individually regulate those. The guidelines also do not apply to after-school concessions at school games or theater events, goodies brought from home for classroom celebrations, or anything a student brings for their own personal consumption.
The new rules will not go into effect until at least one full school year after public comment is allowed and an implementing rule is put in effect to give the schools time to adopt the new standards.
The new rules would be one of many recent changes to the school lunch program to make foods healthier. 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.
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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, USDA exempted in-school fundraisers 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 oz. portion.
The department has also showed willingness to work with schools who have complained that some of the new requirements are hard to meet, relaxing some limits on meats and grains in the subsidized lunches last year.
Schools, industry, interest groups and any critics of the new proposal will have 60 days to comment and suggest changes, before the USDA writes the final rule. The soonest the rules could be in place would be 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 on board 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. Those same companies, like Coca-Cola Co. & PepsiCo Inc., also sell many of the non-soda options, like sports drinks, and have lobbied to keep them in vending machines.
Iowa Sen. Tom Harkin, a Democrat, has been working to take junk foods out of schools since the 1990s. He calls the availability of unhealthy 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.
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MagnumDR said, "The USDA is supposed to tell us what foods may be bad for our health, not to "dictate" when and where we will eat the things they don't recomend. These people are oversteping their boundries of power they have ans should not be allowed to force anything on the American citizens!"
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Looking for direct democracy? Go back a few thousand years to Athens, and even that did not include all citizens. Today, the closest, viable political system is what we have, a representative democracy. Our government's elected officials-- via congress-- provide funding for meals many local school systems simply would not provide.
The 2010 federal legislation to improve school-based nutrition arose from the need to provide at least one meal daily with sufficient value for normal child and adolescent development. This is a huge benefit for all children, but especially those from lower-income families whose home seldom provides healthy food. (And we wonder why behavioral problems are so prevalent and test scores are so low?)
The actual "vote" to place junk in school vending machines came years ago from minders of educational system budgets who sought new sources of revenue, not from parents. These officials watched junk vendor presentations which deceitfully minimized the nutritional damage and maximized the revenue to schools, and they made a quiet decision to sell out both students and their parents. Theirs was not a completely transparent decision, by any means.
The USDA action comes after a long period of neglect and studied indifference to American consumers and their needs. Back then, under predominantly GOP presidents, the USDA was lapdog to the food industry-- the reigning GOP idea was government was to serve as a "friend of business clients" and their few wealthy owners, not the vast constituency of American parents and their children.
Thanks to the efforts of Ms. Obama and many in the public health and medical community, that retrograde and corrupt situation is being remedied to represent the needs of most of the country-- school children, in particular. But this is not a debate about proper nutrition, and a scientifically-sound diet never meant substituting ketchup for one of the vegetables on the school menu (Reagan). Clearly, this is public policy based more on science, not patronage-- in this case, by officials representing a majority of the American public.
*PS-- The USDA is by no means perfect on many of its decisions, and under Secretary Vilsack, frequently reverts to its lapdog behavior with Monsanto marketing of corporate agricultural GMO products. But the USDA school lunch initiative is at least one step in a better direction.
Let the parents decide.
Ironic, isn't it...
But introducing major change demands methodical, patient effort. For every product improvement you could suggest, stop grumbling and take action-- write down your suggestion, first, in a few clear and simple sentences, and then call the grocery (during business hours). Make your suggestion by calling the customer service line most groceries provide. Some groceries (Kroger, Publix and Food Lion, for example) place their comment and customer service numbers on many of their house-brand packages.
The point is most groceries are delighted to hear about suggestions for improvement. If you have a good idea, think of the many others who also had the same idea, but never did anything with it. That makes your idea a front-runner, from the start.
Case in-point. In my experimentation with the nutritional counsel of Dr. Neal Barnard (MD), it became clear many groceries do not stock low glycemic whole wheat bread flour. If bread flour were not milled so finely (to weapons grade powder), its glycemic index would drop dramatically, and those who want low GI bread could make it, themselves. Kroger picked up the suggestion, and has it under study, now.
Government is bought and paid for, which is how vending machines with the big brand names got into schools in the first place.
What Americans ask for, they voted for, and the USDA nutritional measure is made under legislation their representatives put into place-- as noted in the article.
@Hynotoad72-- see my post above about the invasion junk food over decades, and official indifference to nutritional needs of children.