The Alliance for a Healthier Generation (AHG), which is a partnership between American Heart Association and the William J. Clinton Foundation, recently convinced the five largest snack food makers in the nation to create new, healthier snacks to sell to K-12 schools.
The agreement, which creates specific limitations on the fat and caloric counts of snacks sold to schools, is a positive step in the fight against child obesity, as 30 percent of 6 to 19-year-olds are overweight, according to the American Obesity Association. A major culprit of the increasing weight of children is the candy, chips and cookies that have infiltrated schools. Health education classes that tell children not to eat unhealthy foods will fall on deaf ears if as soon as they leave the classroom they have a plethora of unhealthy sweets to appease their appetites waiting for them in the cafeteria.
Replacing this unhealthy food with healthier alternatives in schools is a smart tactic for the alliance, whose goal it is to stop the nationwide increase in childhood obesity by 2010.
But the newest agreement between the alliance and Dannon, Kraft Foods, Mars, PepsiCo and the Campbell Soup Company to engineer healthier snacks for students has its shortfalls.
There are about 70 snack food companies that supply schools, but those products are sold through independent vendors who are not a part of the deal. The only way an agreement such as this one can be effective is if the vendors buy into the deal and also agree to promote the healthier alternatives to schools.
Unfortunately for schools, however, a deal of that magnitude will be difficult to produce. An unescapable reality is that these companies make millions of dollars per year by selling unhealthy food that school children are unwilling to resist. It seems counterintuitive for these companies to willingly remove some of their most popular products from the locations children visit most regularly.
We applaud the companies that did so, but we hope their actions are not just a public relations stunt to create a false image of sincerity in the battle against obesity.
Despite our reservations about the long-term feasibility of this plan, convincing major snack food companies to create healthier versions of their snacks is a victory in and of itself. Giving children more nutritionally sound snack options at school should be an effective step toward improving their diets overall.
We should take care, however, not to place the burden of overweight children only on the companies that cash in on children’s sweet tooths, but on parents and schools as well.
Parents need to take more responsibility for teaching their children acceptable eating habits, including packing their own lunches and ensuring they don’t simply plop on the couch, eat junk-food and watch television after returning home from school.
The burden to a lesser extent also falls on schools, which should refrain from making deals with snack food companies to sell their products during lunch-hour.
As a result of decreasing public funding for education, however, schools are understandably tempted by the extra cash those lucrative deals generate. The Beaverton School District received $900,000 two years ago at the start of a 10-year contract to sell only PepsiCo products in its schools.
Supporters of the alliance say the power of the agreement lies in the expectation that others will join it, and we hope they follow suit. Unless they take those steps, however, junk food in schools is unlikely to undergo meaningful change.
We urge more food companies and vendors to join and strengthen the agreement’s power to provide a means of engaging the childhood obesity problem head on. In addition we recommend that parents increase their efforts to shape their children’s dietary habits; without these attempts, any larger scale program is unlikely to realize its desired outcome.
Obesity war needs more, larger efforts in order to succeed
Daily Emerald
October 9, 2006
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