By Dr. Mercola
Zachary Maxell was not your ordinary fourth grader. Zachary became disenchanted with the school lunches at his large public elementary school in New York City.
Every morning, he read the mouth-watering descriptions on the city’s online lunch menu to see what delectable cuisine was to be served that day.
Zach looked forward to those lunches that read as if they were coming from one of the city’s finest restaurants, but every day his heart sank when he was handed a tray of pale, lifeless, and ultimately tasteless food that was nothing like the advertisement—not by a long shot.
Irritated, hungry, and determined, Zachary decided to take matters into his own hands and went undercover.
Armed with a concealed video camera and a “healthy dose of rebellious courage,” he embarked on a covert mission to collect video footage of lunch—narrowly escaping encounters with the Lunch Lady that would end with embarrassing marches to the principal’s office.
Six months and 75 school lunches later, Zachary turned his secret footage into a short and funny but very eye-opening documentary named “Yuck!,” about New York City’s school lunch program.1
Serving Up Lies
Based on his courageous sleuthing, Zachary Maxwell gathered up enough evidence to allow a comparison between the City’s online advertisements of school lunches and what was actually served.
Was the City being truthful about the “delicious and nutritious” meals they advertised? Hardly!
Far from the mouth-watering culinary representations posted online, school lunches were highly repetitious, consisting mostly of processed foods and notably lacking in fresh fruits or vegetables. No dishes were made in house—meals were essentially a tour of factory food.
Although this was a sampling from only one school, the food quality can probably be generalized to the majority of school lunches across the country. Based upon his data, Zachary determined the following about his school lunch program:
- “Two or more advertised items” were served only 51 percent of the time
- “All advertised items” were served only 16 percent of the time
- Pizza or cheese sticks were served 28 percent of the time, regardless of what the menu advertised
What was Zachary’s ultimate conclusion? The best lunches come in a brown paper bag.
Brown Bagging Is Likely Your Child’s Healthiest Option
Packing a healthy lunch for your child is probably a good idea, as the federal lunch program is in dire need of an overhaul. Any system in which pizza and French fries qualify as “vegetables” is unlikely to offer much nutrition.
Today, the National School Lunch Program operates in over 100,000 private and public schools, as well as residential child care institutions.
In the 2006 book Lunch Lessons, Cooper and Holmes write that, under the current school lunch program, French fries represent 46 percent of “vegetable servings” consumed by children ages two to 19, nationwide.
Skim chocolate milk is the number one school lunch beverage. The rationale for this comes from the ill-conceived plan to restrict your child’s fats—even healthy fats—with complete lack of regard for sugar. The USDA believes substituting sugar for healthy fat in milk is “worth it” to get kids to drink milk.
However, adding sugar and removing healthy saturated fat is a recipe for obesity, heart disease, cancer, and other chronic diseases, which is what we’ve been seeing in children at increasingly younger ages.
This of course completely ignores the fact that the milk is from CAFO animals given GMO feed antibiotics and hormones. Then this dangerous fluid is pasteurized to further destroy its nutritional value.
The USDA’s Smart Snacks in School program gives lip service to offering “healthy choices.” But if you look at this Smart Snacks Infographic,2 you can see that the “smarter, healthier” choices are actually processed foods, including junk foods like tortilla chips and artificially flavored water.
Most school lunches are heavily reliant on high-energy, low-nutrient-value processed foods because they’re cheaper. In 2011, the US spent more than twice as much on air conditioning for troops in Afghanistan than on the National School Lunch Program,3 and today’s childhood obesity rates reflect it.
That said, it’s not simply a matter of inadequate funding—it’s also a matter of how these funds are used.
STUDY: Kids More Likely to Be Obese if They Eat School Lunches
Over the past 14 years, severe obesity has increased among children, according to a 2014 study published in JAMA Pediatrics.4 In NYC, one in five kindergarteners is obese.5
Besides obesity, a poor diet makes kids less academically competitive. In one study, fifth-graders who ate fast food four or more times a week showed 20 percent lower test score gains by the eighth grade.
Are school lunches directly contributing to the obesity epidemic? If you look at the results of a 2010 study,6,7the answer is yes. More than 1,000 sixth graders in Michigan who regularly ate school lunches were found 29 percent more likely to be obese than those who brought lunches from home. Specifically, the kids who ate school lunches:
- Were more likely to be overweight or obese (38.2 percent vs. 24.7 percent)
- Were more likely to consume two or more sugary drinks a day (19 percent vs. 6.8 percent)
- Were less likely to eat at least two servings of vegetables a day (39.9 percent vs. 50.3 percent)
- Were less likely to eat at least two servings of fruits a day (32.6 percent vs. 49.4 percent)
- Were less likely to participate in sports or moderate exercise, and spent more time watching TV, playing video games, and using computers outside of school
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