In the United States, the National School Lunch Program in 2012 underwent a major overhaul. With this program, more fruits and vegetables were offered and attempts were made to eliminate foods such as those containing fat from Tran. These changes were obviously a step in the right direction, but first a couple of reasons that we will point out later why we have not yet gone far enough to provide our children with the necessary nutrition.
Especially in low-income areas where children will not always have the best opportunities for a balanced diet, it is important that the food they eat for lunch is of the highest quality. And even in middle- and upper-income families, when meals are often eaten on the run, school-age children often do not meet their nutritional needs.
An example is milk that is provided in schools. Since there is such a dislike among the authorities for fats in our diet, skim or low-fat milk was considered to be the only milk that could be provided. The problem is that with skim milk there is not much to do, so so that these children could consume milk, they added chocolate. Therefore, we have decided to replace the fat in the school lunch program with sugar. Obviously, too much fat is not good, but statistically it causes far fewer problems than sugar. Reducing saturated fat by 3 grams and increasing sugar by up to 13 grams per cup is a problem, especially with children who consume too much sugar.
The two issues mentioned above that make it difficult for school lunch programs to meet your nutritional needs are:
1. School lunch programs are used as a surplus food distribution program. The United States Department of Agriculture, or USDA, oversees the school lunch program. You also participate in many different food distribution programs, one that deals with taking surplus food that can be bought cheaper and finding a home for it. Since massive amounts of food go to schools under this program, the USDA can kill two birds with one stone by sending this surplus to schools. Obviously, it is questionable whether this cheap and inexpensive food is the most nutritious.
2. Members of the School Nutrition Association and likely have a conflict of interest. Large companies acting as advisors to the nutrition program in US schools are supposed to provide high-quality, low-cost meals to students across the country. Yet these food professionals are some of the largest processed and junk food manufacturers in the country. Obviously, there is a conflict of interest there, as their need to distribute what they produce probably outweighs their desire to provide the nutritious food that is the stated goal.
It is clear that there are many issues at stake here, and there are many players who have multiple agendas in motion. But as adults who are more interested than anyone in seeing that their children are exposed to the best possible food, educating our children in what to eat is one of the most important tasks of parents. Also, it is better not to depend on these school lunch programs as much more than just something that goes on throughout the day and not to depend on them for a high level of nutrition.