Standing in line amid the crowded clamor of lunchtime, eagerly awaiting the crunch of potato chips, or plop of a Twinkie at the vending machine, we don’t often consider what we’re doing to ourselves, or how our school may be sponsoring dangerous lifetime eating habits. In a time when 25 percent of our nation’s children are overweight or obese, few minors are aware of the effects of an American diet. Many don’t even know what they’re eating. More surprising is that schools forced by dwindling budgets now promote fast food to their students. Can school be to blame for the number of children suffering weight-related heart attacks - before they’re old enough to vote?
Junk Food at School
We must first consider the industry that has integrated “Big Mac” into the vocabulary of America’s youth. Corporate companies like Burger King, Pizza Hut, and Taco Bell make billions annually by delivering big taste from low-quality foods that cost relatively little to produce. The huge portions of salt, grease, and sugar we’ve learned to crave are readily accessible at ‘value’ prices. Conveniently fast, affordable, filling food has enabled companies like McDonalds to take in revenues of $40 billion annually. However, like those who eat their items, fast food companies are left with a taste for more. Despite the billions upon billions spent advertising through television, radio, movies, toys, and periodicals, corporations now crave the opportunity to influence their prized audience - children - in the one place we’re sure to be: school.
The colossal industry has taken advantage of the dire condition of US public education by offering million dollar deals to endorse and sell their products in schools. By ensuring the visibility of hallway slurpee ads, providing only Coca-Cola products from brightly-lit vending machines, or rewarding honor roll students with Papa John’s discounts, school districts can triple their budgets.
Poor funding, severe cutbacks, and an administration keen on consistently giving education the shaft have left districts across the country in financial crisis. Fast food education deals are becoming harder to resist, and our nation’s schools are giving in to the temptation of these big, juicy offers.
So now that companies can infiltrate our once ad-free campus environments, what impact does this have on students? It’s not carrot sticks and trail mix being sold here, folks. What makes these programs possible is our country’s precarious addiction to junk food. Sugar-coated, deep-fried, nutritionally bereft foods are making America fat, not to mention cancerous and diabetic.
And now we can get them at school.
Hydrogenated Oils
To prolong shelf-life, manufacturers heat unsaturated fats (usually soy, corn, or cottonseed oils) at a high temperature, and then infuse them with hydrogen. The result is an unnatural trans-fat stripped of nutritional value. Our bodies don’t deal well with these strange lipids and tend to harbor them internally, instead of metabolizing them like we do other calories. Trans-fats raise heart-disease forming lipoproteins, weaken our immune systems, inhibit proper cell response to insulin, and promote the production of free-radicals, known to cause cancer in the body. Most of us aren’t aware that we consume such destructive fats every day, with fast and over-processed foods as our main sources. One Big Mac contains 5.7 grams, a single donut packs 3 grams, one microwave popcorn serving can carry 3.5-4 grams, a medium French fry order provides 7.5-11 grams, and even those little baked Goldfish have .32 grams per cracker of trans fatty-acids.
Virtually all processed snacks are made with equally harmful fully or partially hydrogenated oils, including the packaged cookies, crackers, and chips lurking in our campus machines. And since, due to their number of double bonds, polysaturated "healthy" vegetable oils have usually been oxidized and turned rancid by the time we use them - they too convert to trans-fats - thus widening the menu of free radical-rich foods marketed to kids.
Pop culture has steered us away from those oils actually good for us, like unrefined olive, nut, and coconut products, for fear of their slightly higher calorie count. But good fats, natural monosaturated and moderate levels of saturated fats, are vital to our bodies, burned more efficiently, and offer more satisfying taste. In July 2004, the Institute of Medicine reported to the FDA that no levels of trans-fats were safe in the body.
Still, a flip through television advertising bombards us with hazardous food. From the rancid oils used in deep-frying French fries, buffalo wings, chicken fingers, hamburgers, fish patties, hashbrowns, onion rings, and---if you frequent Bohanon’s, gizzards--- to the more discreet hydrogenated ingredients of taco shells, tortillas, fruit pies, breadsticks, and packaged cookies, fast foods supply large doses of trans-fatty acids. And now these doses are easily available six hours a day, five days a week at your local cafeteria.
Questionable Fundraising
While school made ‘hot lunches’ are at least subject to federal nutrition standards, increasingly popular a la carte options allow students quick access to burgers, fries, pizza, and sodas stamped with a colorful corporate logo. As if feeding unwholesome food to a generation who consume more processed cuisine and who have become less active than ever wasn’t enough, schools now push students to sell commercial junk food--- just to raise funds.
Since starving budgets can’t grant each school related function with the resources necessary, clubs and sports teams have their members selling indirect obesity at a discount price. At my school, we all know it’s swimming season when the cookie dough forms come out, and they add up Mu Alpha Theta figures by the amount of candy sold. We associate speech and debate with their persuasive donut fundraisers and can regularly find Eastside Ram linebackers selling chocolates in the hallway - oh wait, football doesn’t have to fundraise, do they?
As a member of one of the financially underweight sports, I was encouraged to sell Dominos Pizza cards to help pay for my $200 varsity softball player fee. In order to gain the exercise and competitive experience of high school athletics, we’re supposed to market corporate junk food, which induces sluggishness, to our friends and family? After some teeth-gnashing, I was lucky enough to find alternative family business sponsorship, but no athlete or club member should have to chose between supporting giant fast food companies at the price of public health, and having team jerseys or club shirts.
It’s a sad fact that without sufficient educational funding, more students are being transformed into sales reps. As industries like Krispy Crème and Pepsi increase their profits, the health and purity of grade schoolers decreases with every bite. It’s tough enough to navigate the regular world of unhealthy markets, but making fast foods available at school only fuels the obesity epidemic. How many kids actually read the fine print ingredients filling an entire side of the donut box before stuffing chemicalized, lard-fried dough into their mouths by the half-dozen? Few of us are able to resist these treats and must subject ourselves (and our teachers) to the rollercoaster ride of a teenage sugar-high.
On a Sugar High
In the place where our minds should be focused and clear, the accessibility of soft drinks explains why so many school kids are bouncing off the walls. Teenagers drink an average of three sodas per day, each containing a whopping ten teaspoons of sugar! Also, common sweeteners like intestine-coating high fructose corn syrup and aspartame raise triglyceride levels, known to cause age relates illness. If that doesn’t make the medicine go down, there’s always the caffeine level of drinks like Coca-Cola, Pepsi, and Mountain Dew to bring kids to the height of giddy-Richard Simmons energy, then drastically down to the depths of a sugar-low. The figures get dangerous when empty-calorie sodas replace water in adolescent diets. Despite ‘refreshing’ claims, soft drinks actually make you thirstier in the long run and have been linked to calcium deficiencies. Even so, syrupy ‘fruit’ beverages, which contain little or no real fruit at all (like Fruitopia, Gatorade, or canned lemonades), are sold along with the colas on many campuses. Why, just a glance at the scoreboard can tell you who the real winners are - the beverage companies with their names above the lights.
Childhood obesity is just one of many problems that could be improved or even obliterated if we and the government gave public education the respect it deserves. Insufficient funding has made America’s valuable teachers some of the worst paid professionals in the world, and forced school districts to rely on fast food fundraising to make ends meet. At the same time, food industry giants are inspiring a deterioration of our nation’s health, beginning with its children.
Let’s get informed about what we’re eating and unwrap ourselves from the fat fingers of fast food. If we demand alternative fundraising sources for extracurricular activities, then schools can reclaim their dignity as learning environments to promote healthy diets rich in fruit, vegetables, physical activity, whole grains, and the good fats of raw nuts, olive, and coconut oils.
So take charge of your health by avoiding trans-fatty fast food and candy drinks, and improve the health of America by supporting the just treatment of public education. Because hiding from the truth can only be harmful, and it leaves an awful taste in your mouth.
---Want to learn more about fast food? Need to check these nutrition facts? Check out some worthy sources:
Fast Food Nation by Eric Schlosser, published by Houghton Mifflin 2001
The Good Fat Cookbook by Fran McCullough, published by Scribner 2003
. . . and read your ingredients!
--Angelina is a lifelong vegetarian who has been asked more crazy questions than she can remember.
