Columnist Susan Snyder: Machines a weighty issue

Tuesday, June 11, 2002 | 8:23 a.m.

Junk-food machines in Clark County's high schools are making district coffers fat, to say nothing of its students.

And officials who support the vending of poison to our kids were saying just that about them -- nothing.

Last week while Sun reporter Emily Richmond was getting the skinny on how much our high schools raise by selling junk food in vending machines, I was in Wisconsin listening to Lisa Oliphant, director of the President's Council on Physical Fitness and Sports.

"This is not a very divisive issue," Oliphant said to those attending the League of American Bicyclists' national education conference. "I have yet to come across the group who is against us -- the National Couch-Potato Coalition, or whatever."

Come to Nevada, dear woman. Your spuds are sprouting in the Clark County School District.

While school districts in other places are banning machines that dole out fatty, high-calorie foods to an already overweight teen population, our administrators said such machines have a substantial future here.

The machines raise $400,000 to $800,000 a year for clubs, school activities and other projects. And district officials are debating whether to centralize the vending contracts to snare better deals.

This, in a county that just ditched the entire middle school sports program to save money. Most of the vending machines are in high schools. But without middle school sports the kids eating out of them in a couple of years already will have abandoned an active lifestyle.

Maybe district officials are hoping that, by increasing to 3 miles the minimum distance a high school student must live from the facility before he or she can ride a school bus, teens suddenly will walk and ride bicycles more.

Fat chance.

The problem is numbers -- not the fat or calorie intake of your kids, but sheer numbers of kids. When officials close high school campuses next fall, to keep teens from driving during the school day, there will be more students in the building than the cafeterias can feed.

One solution, they say, is giving students numerous 10-minute breaks throughout the day so they can purchase pizza, burgers and other arterial nightmares from carts or machines.

Swell. We'll teach them to eat like overworked adults.

In addition to listing the usual obesity facts and figures, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says 84 percent of young people eat too much fat, and almost a third eat less than one daily serving of vegetables that are not fried.

Schools, the CDC says, should "discourage the availability of foods high in fat, sodium and added sugars on school grounds and as part of fund-raising activities."

Except here.

"We wait until people get sick," said Oliphant, as school officials in my hometown counted their quarters. "We spend more on technology to keep sick people alive than we invest to keep people from getting sick in the first place."

Diabetes in your teenager can rob you of grandchildren. Cardiovascular disease at 17 can rob him of the chance to grow old.

How much is your child's health worth? Does $800,000 really cover it?

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