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Next Friday, June 4, we'll be celebrating with California’s Superintendent of Public Instruction and the California Task Force on Youth and Workplace Wellness to recognize five California school districts for implementing innovative nutrition and fitness programs. As part California's Superintendent’s Challenge, five school districts will be awarded $2,500 each by Stonyfield Farm President and CEO Gary Hirshberg. Stay tuned for more about those awards and the award ceremony next week.
The governor of Tennessee has signed a bill that may send junk food packing out of the elementary and middle schools of his state. The new law allows the state school board to set nutritional standards for vending machine goods sold in the schools. Chips and soda may be history. Read the full story.
Over the weekend, the United Nations' health agency, the World Health Organization, agreed to launch a worldwide campaign against obesity by encouraging people to limit fats, sugar and salt in their diets. The plan was 2 years in the making.
We just noticed this cute and helpful website, Powerful Bones, Powerful Girls, encouraging girls to be active in order to build strong bones. The site helps inform girls about weight-bearing exercises (which build bones) and the importance of calcium consumption. Soccer, dancing, karate, hiking, basketball---they're all recommended in a fun and breezy style. The site comes with a downloadable calendar which can help girls plan their eating and physical activities.
Kids in Florida aren’t taking the obesity problem lying down
…but they are taking it to the cemetery. In Collier County, Florida, kids from the Boys & Girls Club are making their own public service announcement about the dangers of being overweight and a kid, with help from a grant that’s enabling them to film a commercial. They’ll use the cemetery as a backdrop to illustrate what is becoming painfully obvious—being overweight can kill you. Florida has been trying to shape up their schools, where one-fourth of high school students are overweight, but is having limited success. The commercial is part of a community-wide effort.
Even the poorest countries are suddenly having trouble with obesity, according to a report by the International Obesity Task Force. About 1 in 4 people are obese around the globe, making about 1.7 billion people who should lose weight, with 312 million people able to be classified as obese--at least 30 pounds over their recommended weight. A third of all deaths globally can be attributed to being overweight, with its accompanying complications like diabetes, heart disease, high blood pressure and arthritis. The culprit? The usual suspects—junk food, junk food advertising, and a greater availability of fast food and restaurants in nations of all kinds.
Men and women who ate three or more daily servings of whole grain food seem least likely to be overweight or obese, according to a study that confirms the benefits of a varied diet. Also, if you eat a variety of foods (as opposed to eliminating entire food groups because you’re on some fad diet) you get the proper amount of vitamins and nutrients. The researchers said more than half the American population eats less than one serving of whole grain foods each day. Adding variety does not mean eating more food. It means, for example, eating one banana and one orange instead of two bananas, for example. Something to consider when planning meals for your kids!
If you’re like most people and you don’t have a clue whether you are eating the right things or not in any given day, you might pay a visit to the on-line Interactive Healthy Eating Index. Here you can record what you’ve eaten in sort of a diary format. The program will then calculate your food intake based on its nutritional value four different ways, including building your personal Food Pyramid (which may appear a bit lopsided, depending upon what you’ve eaten). The Index will keep track of your food each day and then graph your nutritional intake overtime. This web tool could be a great way to get a handle on where you or your children might be eating too much or too little of a certain food--the first step toward making improvements in your diet.
The Center for Science in the Public Interest’s survey released today on junk food in schools shows the extent of the problem – and demonstrates that Stonyfield Farm’s healthy vending initiative couldn’t be more timely.
The Center’s nationwide survey of vending machines in middle schools and high schools finds that 75 percent of the drinks and 85 percent of the snacks sold are of poor nutritional value. The study included 1,420 vending machines in 251 schools. CSPI contends that all foods sold out of vending machines, school stores, and other venues outside of the official school lunch program should make positive contributions to children’s diets and health.
Our own healthy vending program is one small effort to address this growing problem. We have installed state-of-the-art refrigerated vending machines – each containing our yogurt products, but also foods like string cheese, soy nuts, and pita chips – in public schools in Rhode Island, Massachusetts and California. New York, New Hampshire, and Connecticut are next for machines, and we have a waiting list of 400 schools across the country that have contacted us about the program.
Our lids are off to the folks at the Center for Science in the Public Interest for shedding more light on this challenge and for this important report.
Our CE-Yo, Gary, the father of three, responded, “Let’s face it, businesses like mine can either be part of the problem or part of the solution. Twenty years in the yogurt business have taught me that if kids are offered great-tasting, healthy alternatives they will make the right decision. With healthy vending we can help schools take a step toward improving nutrition and help change our children’s future.”
Check out more about our Menu for Change program and the Ten Steps you might take toward raising questions about what your child might be eating in school.
"The Height Gap," a lengthy and fascinating report in The New Yorker reveals one researcher’s theory that Americans are getting shorter and our poor diets are to blame. The basic idea is that height is our biological “shorthand” for our overall well-being—it reveals our genetics and our upbringing. The United Nations uses height as a means to monitor nutrition in developing countries. "Anthropometric historian" John Komlos has done enough research to show that Americans are losing ground to other nations in the height wars. Europeans gained height in the 21st century, while Americans seem to have stopped growing about 1955. Comparing American infants to Europeans, Americans lose ground in infancy and adolescence, which implies that pre- and post-natal care and teenage eating habits may be to blame. “If these snack foods are crowding out fruits and vegetables, then we may not be getting the micronutrients we need,” Komlos said. In a recent British study, one group of schoolchildren was given hamburgers, French fries, and other familiar lunch foods; the other was fed 1940s-style wartime rations, such as boiled cabbage and corned beef. Within eight weeks, the children on the rations were both taller and slimmer than the ones on a regular diet. Hmmm. Food for thought...?
This just in from the folks at the U.S. General Accounting Office: there is more junk food in the schools than there used to be, and the federal government does very little to limit its presence. In an April 2004 report, we learn that 23 states have dietary guidelines that are more strict than the federal government’s, which are pretty limited. Foods of little nutritional value (ironically called, for the purposes of this report, “competitive foods”) are restricted by the feds from being sold in the food service area during breakfast or lunch-serving times. The majority of schools which participate in the school lunch and breakfast programs do allow sale of these low-nutrition foods in school stores, vending machines, canteens and snack bars. The report cites several small studies which seem to indicate that where these low nutrition foods are sold, less of the healthier food is eaten. What a surprise!
More and more teenagers are becoming vegetarians. If they’ve also given up milk, one worries about whether they’re getting enough calcium. One U.S.D.A. study showed that 9 of 10 girls and 7 of 10 teenage boys were not getting enough calcium, which puts their bones at risk. In addition to eating low-fat milk, cheese, and yogurt (and, no, we’re not just saying this because we sell yogurt) teens should be sure to eat other calcium-rich foods like broccoli, collards or turnip greens, and orange juice and cereal fortified with calcium. Nutritionists recommend 4 high-calcium food servings a day for young women. Each 8-ounce glass of milk (whether skim, 1%, 2%, or whole) and each cup of yogurt has about 300 milligrams of calcium. Children and teenagers between the ages of 9 and 18 should aim for 1,300 milligrams per day. Adults 19 to 50 years of age should aim for 1,000 milligrams per day.
We've put together our own Health and Nutrition Guide for Children, which includes calcium guidelines.
A New Haven, Connecticut school district has declared one of its K-8 schools a "Junk Food-Free School," where students are encouraged to make healthy choices from the cafeteria menu and pilates classes are being offered to teen girls. The changes are part of a district-wide initiative in an economically challenged area. School officials fear the program may harm their budgets. Junk food-stocked vending machines bring in $10,000 a year for this impoverished district. Will kids choose healthy food at the same rate? See what your school district might be able to accomplish if parents get involved, with our Parent Action Kit.
Please use the comment feature below to tell us what your kid's school might be doing to reduce the amount of junk food offered there.
Five school districts in the state of Washington were awarded cash prizes from Stonyfield Farm in ceremonies over the weekend, as part of our Menu for Change and the Washington School Board Challenge. Susan Laarman, representing Stonyfield before a crowd of about 1,000 PTA members, reports the gasps she heard from the crowd when she mentioned that today's generation of youth may have shorter life expectancies than previous generations because of their high rates of obesity. PTA members said they were inspired to spread the message about the need for healthier food in the schools and to encourage other activist parents to get involved.
That's what we're hoping too! Take a look at our Parent Action Kit.
In Arkansas, researchers have proven what folks had only thought might be true: two in five public school students are overweight or at risk of becoming overweight. In 2003, Arkansas became the only state in the country requiring that students have their body mass (BMI) measured. Arkansas has consistently ranked at the bottom of the pile in nationwide rankings of healthiness. Read the full story, then go visit the Arkansas Center for Health Improvement, an entity which is gathering the data that may one day be used to improve things for school kids in that state.
