Editorial: Students should be given healthy meals

Friday, Sept. 27, 2002 | 9:15 a.m.

In the past year it has been encouraging to see a renewed debate as to whether schools should ban junk food and require students to eat nutritious foods instead. Not only are students in large numbers eating foods lacking in nutritional value, but some of the foods they are eating also contribute to serious health problems, including obesity and high rates of cholesterol. In response, Oakland's school district has banned soda and junk food while Los Angeles has banned soda in its school. That same attitude hasn't caught on here, though, which frankly isn't a surprise since Nevada often ranks near the bottom in nationwide surveys that assess how healthy our population is.

It's not just junk foods that are at issue, though. There also are concerns whether the federal government's school lunch program, which provides 24.5 million meals a day, is offering meals that are healthy enough. As Hearst Newspapers reported this week, major food producers jockey for position in the school lunch program -- and sometimes an industry's lobbying clout with Congress and the U.S. Department of Agriculture can affect decisions that are supposed to be based on nutrition alone. Hearst Newspapers noted that the federal government wants the subsidized lunches to contain less fat, but the USDA's two largest purchases are beef and cheese, a seeming contradiction. Health advocates say the USDA instead should require more purchases of vegetables and fruits, which are low in fat. Sometimes powerful interest groups don't win, as happened two years ago when the USDA allowed a greater use of soy in hamburgers -- a big defeat for the beef industry.

In the end, government's primary focus should be on the health interests of students, not the interests of powerful lobbying groups.