The children in the cafeteria drink low-fat milk, shovel corn kernels on their sporks and munch on tuna sandwiches on wheat. One of the most requested vegetables at Brown Mills Elementary School is broccoli, according to its principal.
There are no bake sales here, no birthday cupcakes, no cookies or ice cream. Don’t even think about bringing sugar to Browns Mill Elementary School.
As schools around the country have begun removing soda and junk food from their premises, the elementary school in Lithonia, Georgia, was ahead of the curve, cutting out sugar 10 years ago under the watch of principal Dr. Yvonne Sanders-Butler.
“Childhood obesity, it’s our tsunami, it’s our Katrina,” she said. “If we’re really thinking about the best interests about the young people today, then we will take a stand.”
“When students are healthy, they do their best work…” Sanders-Butler said. “We want to make sure we’re providing foods that will not only nourish the body, but also brain foods.”
Grades get better. Ability to learn increases. Health improves. The kids enjoy it.
Decidedly unAmerican.
Should be this way at all public schools.
How did she get away with it?
Good for her!
“We have preliminary evidence showing benefits of the program in terms of the school level indices, but we’re not able to draw definitive cause-and-effect conclusions due to insufficient data,” – this is the key sentence of the whole article. Proponents claim benefits but they can’t be proven.
This is just another attempt at social engineering by force we must fight because it removes the free will from what we all do. Teach kids not to eat junk food YES. Force their choices NO.
No good deed goes unpunished (for very long). These “healthy” school districts will very likely become targeted by increased military recruitment, in the future. The Army doesn’t want fat soldier boys. Having to slim down the ones it gets, or find desk jobs for the chronically overweight.
In a way, this is ironic. During WW2, the US Army brought cigarettes overseas for the troops. And Coke setup bottling plants in Europe, at the time. Now, the US military probably wishes it could get all its members on a low cal diet. And smoke free! But with recruitment levels as low as they are, they can’t afford to be picky. Or drive them out of the service. That’s one of the reasons they’re using the National Guardsmen more, in combat, besides their permanent members.
The local crack dealer has switched to selling nickel bags of glucose and most of the graduating class plan to go on sugar-related killing sprees as soon as they leave the school.
Since I all but eliminate sugars from my diet, I have noticed an improvement in my health and my mood. I hope it’s the same situation for the kids.
The key phrase is:
“When students are healthy, they do their best work…” Sanders-Butler said. “We want to make sure we’re providing foods that will not only nourish the body, but also brain foods.”
Its really nothing about the health of the kids, just about getting the best grades to justify funding and/or more expensive school fees than the next school.
As #4 says, you have to properly educate the kids and their parents so that they make the best decisions for themselves, not give them NO choice in the matter so that whenever they get home from school they immediately rush to the fridge or pantry for a sugar hit, then get indoctrinated by advertisements for whatever sugar-laden foods and sugar-water the TV will brainwash them with.
This just about kills the old joke:
Q: What’s the difference between broccoli and snot?
A: Kids hate eating broccoli.
It’s amusing to read here about the kids having no choice in what to eat during their school lunches. I hope these comments are in jest, because it’s not like they have much of a choice either way!
Most schools simply give you no choice except the unhealthy sugar and fat laden stuff instead of the better quality stuff you should actually eat.
Sounds to me like an administration that actually cares about the kids…
Shock and horror!
So do the students at this school have better-than-average health or just better behavior?
I cut all sugar and corn syrup out of my diet about 18 months ago to help manage a chronic illness (not weight related), and I was amazed to find that the “staple” item that took the hardest hit was bread! Go to a normal grocery store and try to find one single loaf of bread, much less rolls or hot dog buns, that doesn’t have high fructose corn syrup in it. I eventually gave up looking becase 100% of the bread carried by every major grocery store in my area has HFCS and/or sugar in it! Now I make my own bread or buy the fresh baked stuff from Whole Foods, nothing else ever.
The reason I bring this up is because the article mentions that the kids are eating “tuna sandwiches on wheat bread”. I would love to know what wheat bread they’ve been able to find that doesn’t have any sugar or corn syrup in it! And even if they did manage to find some, it would still be chocked full of preservatives. I also can’t have soy of any kind, and wouldn’t let my child injest soy either. I applaud the effort, but sugar is only the most visible of a long list of poisonous substances constantly fed to our nation’s youth.
I’m almost grateful that my chornic disease prevents me from having children, because I think the only way to raise truly healthy children would be to move to a cabin in the woods and make everything from scratch. Maybe someday our government will wise up and stop subsidizing the production of HFCS and start subsidizing fresh fruit and vegetables instead, which would allow bread to go back to being just bread and juice to go back to being just juice, rather than every item on every store shelf being crammed full of corn syrup.
#13- Ryot.
Do you really have some kind of allergy to Soy? Or is it just some phobia, cause by what you’ve read? I think there’s a lot of propaganda spread by the dairy industry about Soy being poisonous. My elder father read something to that effect, and naturally bought it hook, line and sinker. But I’ve tried Soy milk on a few occasions, and other soy based products, with no ill effects. And I think it’s far more likely consumers would suffer from trace amounts of growth hormones and antibiotics in cows milk, than from byproducts of the Soy bean. You know that even the “eyes” of potatoes and the seeds of apples, are considered poisonous. So better not eat those either. Just to be safe. Take care.
Judging from experience when I was a kid (50s), the lunch stuff in greatest demand was the sweet stuff. Some kids walked to a grocery store a couple blocks away to buy Hostess Cupcakes and Twinkies with their milk money.
As far as soy is concerned, the stuff is tasteless and not something I waste money on with one exception: soy sauce.
I love broccoli, and wonder why this delicious secret vegetable was kept from me in my childhood.
#14 – Glenn
Actually I do have a medical reason for not ingesting soy – in addition to the chronic illness that has forced me off sugar and many other items, I also have thyroid disease, which is made worse by eating soy. I have seen the effects myself when I switched to soy milk to try to combat a mild milk allergy, and my thyroid disease, including the blood tests used to measure the disease, got markedly worse. I have been advised by multiple doctors to just remove soy from my diet completely.
There are true milk options that do not involve chemically altered plants (ie soy or rice), antibiotics, or growth hormone. Most organic cow’s milk does not contain antibiotics or growth hormone, and many people are starting to return to the way milk is *meant* to be consumed, in its raw form – see RealMilk.com. My slight milk allergy went away when I switched to raw milk, because like many people, my allergy was actually to the pasteurization process that leaves the dead, exploded bodies of all the “bad stuff” floating in the milk, and not to the milk itself. Not to mention that humans are the only animals that drink milk in adulthood, and given the right diet, humans can survive without any dairy at all, without substituting chemically altered plants.
Your assumption that my avoidance of soy is driven by some sort of superstition rather than by medical necessity is the sort of narrow thinking that makes shopping and eating out so difficult for me – and is exactly the same as the school claiming to be sugar free while still serving commercial bread. Just because you can eat soy without any ill effects doesn’t mean that I can eat it without ill effects. If I ate as much soy as the “health food” industry seems to want me to, given their advertisements, I would end up in a coma, it’s a medical certainty. How can a substance that negatively affects people with a fairly common disease be unleashed upon an unwitting public without so much as a safety warning?? Even over the counter cough medicine has a safety warning for people with thyroid disease!
The point of my original post was that there are many items that are sold as “food” in this country that are unsafe for certain people, or unsafe in large amounts, or unsafe over the long term – and many more that we simply don’t know the long term affects of. If soy is safe for you but not for me, who is to say that something the school is feeding those children isn’t having long-term ill effects on one or more of those children? Again, I applaud the effort, but sugar and corn syrup are in everything these days, along with many other potentially harmful substances. Sugar is just the convenient poster child.