When retired military officers are advocating for food reform in our schools, you know there’s a serious problem. Last Tuesday Mission: Readiness, a group of retired Generals, Admirals and other senior leaders of the United States Armed Forces, unveiled its new report, “Too Fat To Fight: Retired Military Leaders Want Junk Food Out of America’s Schools.” Here are a couple of the alarming statistics you can find in their report:
“Within a ten-year period ending in 2008, the number of states reporting that 40 percent or more of their young adults were overweight or obese went from just one state, Kentucky, to 39 states.”
“The journal Health Affairs reports that 80 percent of children who were overweight at ages 10-15 were obese at age 25.”
Junk Food in Vending Machines
These retired military leaders have identified the junk food and sugary drinks that are sold in school vending machines and stores as the primary culprits. As their report points out, “Over the past two decades, Americans have increased their daily calorie intake by 250 to 300 calories.” As we stated here a few weeks ago, it’s not the occasional sweet at a school bake sale that is causing childhood obesity, it’s the food our children are consuming every day. When we went to middle school and high-school, there were bake sales, but there were no vending machines making Doritos, Linden’s cookies, and Pop-Tarts available to us every day (read ingredients here). And despite the Department of Education’s attempts to improve the “nutritional value” of these processed foods so that no single serving contains more than 200 calories or 10 percent saturated fat, make no mistake that it is still junk food filled with empty calories that our children don’t need.
So why, in the midst of this health crisis which many are calling an epidemic, hasn’t Mayor Bloomberg, who eliminated trans fats from city restaurants, removed the junk food from our schools? One possible explanation is the $28 million New York City schools are projected to make over the next five years from the vending machines. The sad truth is that the Department of Education and the food companies providing the junk food are making a lot of money by making our children fat. But the report from Mission: Readiness has an answer for this as well: “research shows that reducing high-calorie, low-nutrition foods and beverages…does not hurt a school’s bottom line. The sales of school lunches increase when junk food and sugary beverages are limited.”
Whether the Department of Education would make up the loss revenue with increased sales of school lunches is irrelevant. Schools should not be making money at the expense of our children’s health. And yet the junk food continues to be sold out of greed, apathy, or some combination of both. If the distressing statistics regarding the state of our children’s health aren’t enough to persuade Mayor Bloomberg and Chancellor Klein to remove the junk food from our schools, maybe this quote from Mission: Readiness’ report will: “The United States military stands ready to protect the American people, but if our nation does not help ensure that future generations grow up to be healthy and fit, that will become increasingly difficult. The health of our children and our national security are at risk. America must act decisively.” Let’s hope that now our elected officials will do just that.
Fantastic article- corruption in high places- these people (our corporate and civic leaders) seem to have no conscience at all. Perhaps we should start a campaign of destroying their machines. Some real political/consumer ACTivism- They stuck a pepsi machine in my kids park- Bleecker playground. Disgusting slow death poison. We should make bloomie drink it
Have not read the article yet, but find it disturbing that the military is advocating for our kids health so they will be eligible to enlist. The NSLP was started in part as a response to young men being rejected from military service in WWII due to poor nutrition. All around gross.