A huge investment in school meals would pay back huge dividends

Just after the latest figures regarding the chronic problem of obesity in Scotland  were released a new study done in America shows that children over there are suffering from the same sort of problems and are not getting enough fruit and vegetables as well as other important foodstuffs in their diet. The report produced by the Institute of Medicine which forms part of the National Academies claims that children in America are eating too much pizza, hamburgers, sweets and sugary drinks.

The report which was compiled by a committee headed by Professor Virginia Stallings from The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia said that it was not only children that were not eating a balanced diet but adults too. Professor Stallings stressed that there were only a few opportunities for health authorities to be able to have a big impact on the eating habits of children and the most important one was making them eat healthily at school.  She explained that by getting children to eat healthily at school they had a unique chance to ‘touch every child's life’, which should not be wasted.

In America special food programs for schoolchildren produce 40 million meals every single day and are responsible for the over half of the daily calorie and nutritional intake for millions of schoolchildren. School breakfasts and lunches will be reexamined by the American Congress next year and therefore there is a lot of pressure on the relevant authorities to provide better food for school children.

The report which was almost 200 pages long noted for example that school meals were providing only 50% or even less of the recommended amount of vegetables and fruit from United States government guidelines on diet. At Ukmedix News we believe that the American government needs to lead the way in getting healthy eating programs into their schools if they are serious about counteracting the long term effects of obesity. A huge investment in school meals would pay back huge dividends in the next ten to twenty years and the president elect Barack Obama must take brave steps to change the eating habits of the American people for good.