Surprise! Letting govt. control kids’ diets goes bust.

posted at 9:44 am on December 13, 2011 by Jazz Shaw
[ Culture ]   

Obesity among children is apparently on the rise, and one portion of that issue obviously involves their diet. So out in Seattle, the school district took swift action several years ago and removed all of the candy, soda and junk food from the vending machines in the schools. Instead, students were offered things like bottled water, juice and dried banana or apple chips. So… how’s that working out for ya?

The Seattle School Board is considering relaxing its ban on unhealthful food in high schools amid complaints from student governments that the policy has cost them hundreds of thousands of dollars in vending-machine profits over the past seven years.

But board members now acknowledge they probably went too far. The restrictions, which are more strict than the now-crafted state and federal nutrition guidelines, allow only products such as milk, natural fruit juice, baked chips and oat-based granola bars.

Perhaps not surprisingly, many students are not particularly interested in those items.

In 2001, before the junk-food ban was passed, high-school associated student body (ASB) governments across the city made $214,000 in profits from vending machines, according to district data. This year, they’ve made $17,000.

Well, there’s a shock. In a television report on CNN they interviewed a few students who said they were simply either bringing their own treats to school or running out at lunch or during study halls to the store down the street and buying them. Gee… ya think? So the end result was just that they cost the student government a ton of funding with no real change in dietary habits.

Keeping children healthy is important. It involves a lot of personal choices involving not only what and how much they eat, but how much physical activity they get, as opposed to sitting in front of the television or a video game. And who do you suppose has the real power to influence those choices? At one time in the far distant past I seem to recall that parents were responsible for that, not the school or the government. And if the parents fail at that job, Seattle has demonstrated once again that the rest of the “village” is completely incapable of it.

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