Thin school lunch funding producing fat kids

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2010/05/16/EDJB1DF1E7.DTL

Thin school lunch funding producing fat kids

Trimming the fat from America's youth will require completely changing how America eats, and a good starting place is school lunch. Yet the national school lunch legislation moving through the Senate won't put better foods on the menu.

Under the current funding formula, once overhead costs are subtracted, schools have about 90 cents per meal for ingredients. The bill proposes increasing funding by 6 cents per meal per day over 10 years.

The USDA provides public schools commodities - mostly meat, potatoes, cheese, grains, eggs and oils. Only 13 percent of commodities provided are fruits and vegetables. Thus the steady diet of pizza, chicken nuggets and tater tots in the school lunchroom, rather than the lean meat, fresh vegetables and whole grains the USDA food pyramid recommends.

Is it any surprise, then, that a government-funded study of 13,500 schoolchildren found a link between childhood obesity and the carb-heavy school lunches?

Ten percent of Americans participate in the National School Lunch Program. We need to invest more than 6 cents in our kids' health.

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