Some school cafeterias are striving to offer students better lunch options in terms of both nutrition and taste. Do you think eating cafeteria food is unhealthy for you? Nearly 20 percent of children in the U.S. have been diagnosed with obesity. Some of the blame for this comes from cafeteria food and a lack of exercise. Every day millions of students around the world eat lunch that is served at school. Numerous factors lead to unhealthy eating in schools and on campuses. I think that cafeteria food is not safe to eat. Every time you take a bite you are harming your health.
Unhealthy cafeteria food is a problem for countless reasons. Eating unhealthy foods at school at an early age can lead to bad eating habits for the rest of your life. This leads to obesity in children, and continuing to adults. “Currently over two thirds of states in America have obesity rates. For adults over twenty percent and nearly 1 in 3 children are overweight or obese.”(Scheff, Examiner, Food Revolution) This is just one of the ways that cafeteria food affects you in a negative way.
School lunches contain ingredients that we are not aware of. Some school lunch pizzas contain up to 25 different ingredients. This number does not reflect the actual number of ingredients in each individual ingredient, such as the sauce, crust, cheeses, and toppings. School pizza is an indicator for additives and preservatives. “Some of the ingredients found in the pizza include azodicarbonamide” (Scheff, Examiner, Food Revolution). This is food bleach which pulls double duty as a plastic anti-foaming agent. These types of chemicals are not safe for you to intake. Just think about how much damage it could cause to your body. There is nothing positive about this chemical when it comes down to entering your body.
Pink Slime has swept the nation, which has made students and families wonder just what exactly goes into the hamburgers that come out of the cafeteria. Pink slime is disinfected meat scraps that are grinded and mixed together. For sterilization this meat product is also coated with ammonium hydroxide, an edible ingredient. “This is also a component in many household cleaners, and commonly found in many household items.” (Chertow, The Lowell, the Lowell) Schools use pink slime in the place of meat. This is not safe and should not be served in any school cafeteria. Ammonium hydroxide has been known to cause coughing and trouble breathing.
I don't think our school lunch is healthy because it has fat and too much sodium. Although it is good it is fattening it is the reason for much of the obesity in the U.S. Many kids have no other option to eat the unhealthy school lunches or they will be hungry.
Allowing healthier school lunches will decrease obesity in children because it will give them the proper nutrition to reduce the risk of health issues. Since obesity causes many health issues, maintaining a proper nutrition will reduce the risk of health issues. According to Star- Telegram, a daily newspaper that serves Fort Worth and areas of North Texas states, “[School lunches that have] a meal of pizza sticks, a banana, raisins and whole milk has given way to whole wheat spaghetti with meat sauce, a whole wheat roll green beans, broccoli, cauliflower, kiwi and low-fat milk … This change will help more than 2.4 million Texas students who receive a free or reduced- price school lunch to lead healthier, more active lives—in and out of the classroom”(Par. 2 and 4). School lunches are supposed to guarantee students a well balance meal, so they can have the energy to proceed with their classes throughout the day. Meanwhile, students who receive a f...
Schools are meant to give our children a healthy and nurturing environment, and yet so much of the lunches in schools are fattening; does this stop schools from achieving the aforementioned goal? Childhood obesity in the United Sates continues to be a growing problem despite so any new programs to help combat it, and new research is showing how schools may be playing a large role in childhood obesity. School lunches are showing to be the problem, they encourage poor nutrition in our nation’s students, and simple reform is proving to not be enough to stop the rise in obesity rates.
“More than 76 percent of schools sell soft drinks and sweetened fruit drinks, but fewer than half offered bottles water. Fewer than 15 percent sell low-fat or nonfat yogurt, and fewer than one third order skim milk. Only 25 percent of schools say they've reduced fats and oils in recipes.”(Spake, 2). Choices at lunch range from greasy to unidentifiable. Most students eat school lunches five days a week. So most of the food they eat throughout the week comes from the school cafeteria. Although, the schools do tend to offer healthy choices such as salads, subs, skim milk, and unlimited fruits and vegetables. “Each week Phoenix students are served a variety of fruits and vegetables from guava to grapes and jicima to red peppers. School officials hope that by exposing children to fruits and vegetable they may develop a taste for them and request their parents to buy them.”(Bailey, 1). Real meat is becoming an issue in schools. “According to reports issued by the Physicians Committee for responsible Medicine (PCRM) the USDA dumps hundreds of millions of pounds of surplus beef, chicken, cheese, and pork on the National School lunch Program.”(Lord, 42). Chicken isn't whole white meat; some of it doesn't even taste like meat! Let’s move on to unhealthy foods. There are unlimited amounts of un...
Healthy school lunches would help students academically. There is not a teacher who would want their students to be distracted. Often when children are hungry, because of a light lunch, or a lunch full of simple carbohydrates, they will become distracted. If schools serve lunches with whole grains and protein, the students would stay full and attentive much longer than a student with a lunch of sugar, white bread, and lush greens. Although many believe that schools should provide a healthy lunch for students, there is a small percentage which feels that because of the budget cuts, schools should not pay for more expensive and healthier food. Shereen Jegtvig, a nutritionist, wrote "Appleton, Wisconsin replaced their regular poor-quality school lunches with healthy fresh food…changes resulted in improved b...
...rition, but it is up to the students to take the foods offered and actually consume the proper nutrients. School lunches that abide by the National School Lunch Program guidelines encourage proper nutrition for students because they contain numerous fruits and vegetables, whole grains and meat or meat alternates, low-fat dairy and water, limited amounts of fat, limited sodium, appropriate portion sizes, and healthy calorie amounts. Schools are still able to offer many of the foods they offered in the past; the catch is that they must follow the updated nutritional guidelines of the National School Lunch Program. In conclusion, those slices of pizza, cheeseburgers, chicken strips, chocolate milk, French fries, chocolate chip cookies, and spaghetti, which are served to students for school lunch all around the nation, may not be so bad for students’ health after all.
School lunch is an obvious problem that has yet to be fixed. Mark Samuelsson once said, “We struggle with eating healthily, obesity, and access to good nutrition for everyone. But we have a great opportunity to get on the right side of this battle by beginning to think differently about the way that we eat and the way that we approach food.” A well know fact to almost all students and their parents is that there are many problems with school lunches and it needs to change. Not only is school lunch unhealthy, but it also does not taste good most of the time. Some people feel that school lunch is not that big of a deal so it should be very cheaply processed in factories and preserved, but that is not the case. In order to solve the lingering
According to School Lunches: Healthy Choices vs. Crowd Pleasers, Amanda Lanser schools were wrong.“Schools could include students in making decisions about what fruits and vegetables are served at lunch”. If schools did a vote about what fruits and vegetables kids would want provided at school more kids would eat the foods. The reason why kids might not eat the healthiest food is because they don’t like those types of vegetables and fruits. Studies show that when kids have a healthy lunch they perform better in school than the kids who don’t. Kids should have a say in the healthy item that are provided in school. In conclusion kids should be able to choose healthier foods they are
These non-organic foods come packed with preservatives, pesticides, and other harmful substances to children. Researchers conducted a study that linked school lunches to performance in the classroom. Students’
Williamson, D. A., Han, H., Johnson, W. D., Martin, C. K., & Newton, R. L. (2013). Modification of the school cafeteria environment can impact childhood nutrition. Results from the Wise Mind and LA Health studies. Appetite, 61, 77–84. doi:10.1016/j.appet.2012.11.002
While the snacks available in school vending machines may be rich in flavor, they also are rich in fats and calories. Regulation of competitive foods in schools around the globe continues to be a highly contested debate. With an endless amount of information to consider, solutions to implementing healthier foods in school vending machines and lunch lines vary enormously. Analyzing multiple studies worldwide, discussing the issue from multiple perspectives, and examining the demographics of those impacted by food showcase the importance of nutrition in schools. By providing several studies with different ways to implement healthier foods into schools, one may view the issue with a broader scope.
I walked into the lunchroom, and they handed me my lunch tray. They gave me a scoop of orange looking spaghetti with 3 meatballs that were the size of a tennis ball. The school should change the school lunch menu because the food looks raw and like different color, also the food looks disgusting, and its really bad for your health. I believe they can change the schools lunch preparation.
Lunch is one of the most important meals of the day and is consumed mostly in school cafeterias for children and adolescence. Wholesome lunches are vital in maintaining a healthy metabolism and give children energy for the rest of the school day. Children are advised to eat healthily but do not always do so because the choices of tastier, fatty foods offered in school cafeterias. The National School Lunch Program, NSLP, which is a federally assisted meal program operating in public and nonprofit private schools set nutritious guidelines for lunches served in school cafeterias (USDA). However, school campuses still offer foods high in fat as well as selling candy, chips, and soda in their vending machines, as well as their school shops. In order
Students all around the nation refer to lunch as their favorite subject of the day, not only does it provide a social hour, but it also supplies a day 's worth of energy in one meal. However, it centers around one of the most problematic issues school systems face today. Children are constantly reminded that it is essential for them to take care of their bodies and fuel it with needed nutrients, but, ironically, schools are the guilty of distributing some of the worst meals students could possibly consume on a daily basis, simply because they are economical and easy to distribute on a budget. Although, schools do claim to exerting an effort towards giving students healthier foods. Nevertheless, many nutritionists would not consider a diet soda,
School cafeterias and school vending machines do not encourage the best eating habits in schools, high schools in particular. It is more convenient to serve frozen foods like pizzas and frozen lasagnas almost every day. Without realizing how those unhealthy foods are really affecting the kids performances in school and their everyday life activities, such as in physical education class.