School food has been under scrutiny in California. Five years ago, the state passed some of the strongest school-food legislation in the nation in hopes of combating childhood obesity. These rules limit the kinds of unhealthy foods that students can buy in vending machines or at a snack bar, which aren’t offered as part of lunch in the school’s cafeteria.

The state is well-known for leading the nation with health trends, so it’s no surprise that its leaders are out front when it comes to cutting back on junk food in schools. A new study shows their efforts may be working: High school students in California are eating fewer calories and less added sugar and fat during the school day than students from other states.

According to researchers, high school students in California eat about 160 fewer calories a day than students in the 14 other states studied, which have less stringent standards for junk foods. Most of these saved calories came from eating less while in school, and when students headed home they didn’t appear to overeat to compensate for consuming fewer calories during the school day.

“If teenagers consume 158 fewer calories on average, while maintaining healthy levels of physical activity, it could go a long way toward preventing excess weight gain,” says Daniel Taber, lead author of the study and investigator at the Institute for Health Research and Policy at the University of Illinois in Chicago.

The research was funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and published in the Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine.

Limiting calories from junk food could potentially help a student shed about 7.5 pounds over the school year, according to an accompanying editorial in the Archives Journal by Dr. Barbara Dennison. This could add up to 30 pounds by the end of high school.

But registered dietitian Andrea Giancoli, who is a spokesperson for the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, points out that the study did not compare the weight of children in California to the weight of students in the 14 other states. Further studies are needed to find out if California students are indeed winning the obesity battle.

Taber says more work needs to be done.

“Just because students cannot purchase high-fat, high-sugar candies does not automatically mean they’re eating a spinach salad in its place. If we really want to improve the quality of students’ diet, we need to promote fruits, vegetables, whole grains and other healthy alternatives that appeal to students,” Taber said.

In 2010, President Barack Obama signed the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act to overhaul child nutrition standards. The law gave the U.S. Department of Agriculture the authority to come up with new school lunch standards, which will be implemented in the upcoming school year.

The USDA is drafting standards to also regulate competitive foods – the snacks and junk food that are not included in the meal plan, but that students can buy from the vending machines or at other locations in school. These standards may be completed within the next year.

In the meantime, California and several other states such as Oregon and Massachusetts have put together strong competitive food standards for their high school students to get a jump on the junk foods issue.
“The school setting can make significant change, but we all have to work together. It takes a village to raise a child. Neighborhoods and food companies, restaurants and the marketers of junk food have to jump on the bandwagon as well to solve this childhood obesity problem,” says Giancoli.

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Isaac and Samuel Jadav plan to miss out on fish and chips on Friday lunchtime, Rachel Husband hasn’t had a cup of tea all week, and 84-year-old Alice Rutter “rebelled” on Tuesday and ate four grapes. All four are taking part in Live Below the Line, a five-day challenge to see what it’s like to have just £1 a day to spend on food and drink.

This is the second year the scheme has run globally after growing out of an experiment by two charity workers, and its founders the Global Poverty Project hope more than 20,000 people will take part in the UK, Australia and the US. It says it has so far raised more than $2m (£1.2m) from sponsorship for a range of charities including Christian Aid and Unicef. But the aim is more to raise awareness of the 1.4 billion people around the world who have less than a £1 a day on which to live.

Those taking part acknowledge they cannot come close to experiencing what it is like to live in that kind of poverty, and there’s a difference between living on £1 a day and having just £1 to spend on food and drink. But Elisha London, UK country director for the Global Poverty Project, believes the challenge does get people to look again at the plight of others around the world. “The purpose isn’t to simulate extreme poverty – it physically wouldn’t be possible unless people went homeless. But people do start thinking, ‘Imagine if your travel and electricity and water had to come out of this money too’,” she says.

Isaac and Samuel’s mother Chris says seeing a colleague in Haiti take up the challenge has inspired her family this week. They are attempting five days on a food budget of £25 for five people – about £70 less than they usually spend (the difference will go to charity). Chris, who works in Cornwall for Christian Aid, admits there are “probably economies of scale” to be had through feeding a large family rather than trying to buy food as an individual. She says she gave her 11- and seven-year-old children, and two-year-old Lucy, the option to take part or not, but the older ones were enthusiastic participants.

“They’ve been the ones saying, ‘If we were being authentic we wouldn’t have the house, we wouldn’t have fresh water’.” She says there was a little bit of disappointment when they realised they would miss their favourite school dinners of roast dinners and fish and chips, but decided to keep going. “It will be interesting to see how much their awareness is raised by this, but it has made a difference – something like an egg becomes more valuable, rather than just an egg, and meals are enjoyed more because they are hungrier.”

Rutter, a methodist local preacher, is taking the challenge to raise money for people overseas, but she says it has made her reflect on people closer to home. “It has made me more thoughtful about the plight of people – I am raising money for people in abject poverty but it has made me think about people in Europe as well.”

Rutter says planning has been key to creating a reasonable diet on less than £1 a day: “I managed to get special offers and deals in advance – very poor people might not have the opportunity or time to do that.” She says she wasn’t surprised to find she couldn’t afford meat or fish, but the high price of fruit and vegetables has alarmed her. “The other day I was fed up with eating stodge so I rebelled and I bought 12 grapes – they were half price but they still cost me 18p. I’ve been having just two at a time, so I’ve still got a few left.”

Husband has not been so organised, and is getting by on Supernoodles and budget-brand cornflakes. She was inspired to take part after moving to London and feeling like everything was incredibly expensive: “I saw an article on Live Below the Line in Metro and realised I didn’t have it that bad.” She says the experience opened her eyes to how much money she’s been frittering away, and will make her change her habits in the future.

You too can sign up for the challenge throughout May.

Elisha London’s pea risotto recipe – feeds two for 56p

1/2 an onion (8p)

2 stock cubes (8p)

200g rice (20p)

100g peas (20p)

1 Brown slices of onion in a pan (if you can afford oil, great, if not just be careful not to burn onions).

2 Add rice to the pan, and warm until it starts to go clear.

3 Gradually add 700ml of vegetable stock to the rice, 100ml at a time until it is absorbed.

4 At the end add in peas until they are cooked.

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Proponents of an American Nanny State have a plan to improve your health: tax sugar and “junk” food so you will eat less of it. Subsidies for broccoli and beets are close behind. These plans for bureaucrats and politicians to remake your diet are bad news for four reasons.

First, it is no one’s business but yours what you eat. The freedom to eat a slice of apple pie might not sound quite as stirring as freedom of speech, but the ability to choose how to live our lives is the most fundamental freedom. What you eat is no one’s business but yours.

Second, even if the government has a role to play in guiding our dietary choices, efforts at restructuring Americans’ lives via the tax code are fundamentally flawed.

This strategy has given us a tax system of unimaginable complexity: the Internal Revenue Code is almost 10 million words long, and if you stacked IRS regulations into a pile they’d be more than a foot tall. The leading publication for tax professionals takes up nine feet of shelf space. And that doesn’t count the tens of thousands of pages of laws and regulations concerning sales, use, property, excise, and other taxes levied by all layers of government.

Taxes need to be simple and easy to administer. As tax laws get fatter, they clog our economic arteries and stifle economic growth. Trying to fine tune Americans’ diets via a “junk food” tax will further fatten the tax laws, and the wallets of accountants and tax lawyers. If there are any Americans unaware that sugar and potato chips are fattening – despite our $35 billion per year diet industry – we don’t need a tax to enlighten them, just some public service announcements.

Third, the government’s record on dietary control is problematic. The federal government has been involved in the sugar market since the War of 1812. Nanny Staters promise that this time they’ll get things right but if they haven’t managed to do so in 200 years, why should we believe them now?

The details of official rules are written in back rooms in Congress and government agencies. When those details are drafted, those best able to influence the results are the lawyers and lobbyists for special interest groups.

For sugar, that’s the manufacturers of high fructose corn syrup and the 17 domestic sugar cane producers who reap millions of dollars annually under our current agricultural subsidies and sugar tariffs – not you and me.

Finally, the Nanny State brigade promises to spend the extra tax money on subsidies for “healthy” foods and lifestyles. New York Times columnist Matt Bittman enthuses about money for “gyms, pools, jogging and bike trails,” “Meals on Wheels” for the elderly, “Head Start” programs for children, and “supermarkets and farmers’ markets.”

If we examine the government’s record in spending the billions of dollars from state governments’ lawsuits against tobacco companies, we can see that this is pure fantasy.

Remember when the states settled their lawsuits against the tobacco companies in 1998? The settlements produced billions in new state revenues from higher cigarette prices.

States promised to spend vast sums on anti-smoking programs. The reality is different. The Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids tracks state tobacco prevention spending and tobacco revenues and found that over the first ten years of the settlement, states spent just 3.2 percent of the money on tobacco prevention and cessation programs.

Nanny Staters promise the sun, moon and stars to get new taxes on the books, but deliver little else.

ABOUT THE WRITER

Andrew Morriss is a professor of law and business at the University of Alabama. Readers may write to him at: 101 Paul W. Bryant Drive East, Tuscaloosa, Ala. 35487; email: amorriss@law.ua.edu.

This essay is available to McClatchy-Tribune News Service subscribers. McClatchy-Tribune did not subsidize the writing of this column; the opinions are those of the writer and do not necessarily represent the views of McClatchy-Tribune or its editors.

2012, McClatchy-Tribune Information Services

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