The Push to Make School Lunches Healthier

School lunches for our children have been lacking in enough of the proper nutrients for our young ones. New standards have been proposed to match up with the new updated government’s own dietary guidelines that were revised in 2005. These new guidelines call for an increase in fruits and vegetables and more whole grains.

The standards for our lunches in the present status is definitely deficient according to the new guidelines. There also has been no calorie restriction for our children and, in light of the fact that childhood obesity is on the rise, this factor needs to be addressed. The changes proposed for the school meal programs will be costly. Breakfast prices may to up 20% and lunch prices may be up as much as 4%.

Congress is currently being pressured to increase spending allotted for school meal programs. The need for more fruits, vegetables and whole grains is recognized by The Institute of Medicine as an important priority for federal dollars. Federal standards should be followed for the new dietary guidelines since the government subsidizes lunch and breakfast programs for children in need.

The new recommendations for the school meal programs emphasize fruits, vsgetables and whole grains more than they have in the past. Within the week, they recommend 2 1/2 to 5 servings of fruit be offered for lunch and 5 servings of fruit for breakfast. For vegetables, the recommendation is to offer 1 1/4 to 2 1/2 servings for lunch. For whole grains, they recommend offering 9 to 13 servings for lunch within the week.

Hopefully, these new updated standards will be implemented for our children as overweight children are now outnumbering undernourished children in our country. All of our children will be nourished better with less obesity problems under the new standards. They would be better able to focus and concentrate, and be better students, behave better, and also maintain a normal, healthy weight for children.

I remember when I went to school, even though it was long ago, the healthiest option was to eat at the salad bar, and you know damn well that most kids wouldn’t be eating from a salad bar when they are faced with much more enticing choices, like sticky buns and macaroni salad, cheeseburgers and french fries, and toasted cheese sandwiches with soup.

Shoot, I remember thinking that I could be totally bad if I wanted to at school and my parents would never know that all I ate that day was pizza, ice cream and fudge, of course at that time I didn’t understand that these foods weren’t at all contributing to my concentration or performance in school like healthy foods would have.