School Initiatives to Prevent Obesity

Children spend many hours in school as they grow, giving schools a unique role to play in promoting healthy living. The vast majority of children, almost 95 percent, attend school and school is the most consistent and intensive influence on children outside of the family. Children spend a third of every weekday in school or roughly 12,000 hours by the time they graduate from high school. One important factor in healthy living is maintaining a healthy weight. Obesity rates are rising in children with approximately 30 percent of school-aged children overweight and 15 percent obese. Overweight children tend to grow into overweight adults. Health issues that used to primarily affect only adults, such as Type 2 diabetes and hypertension, are increasingly affecting overweight children with concomitant costs to the individual and to the healthcare system.

Being overweight as a child is linked to lower academic achievement, greater absences from school, and social problems. Schools offer many opportunities for developing obesity-prevention strategies and these fit within the mandate of schools as health and success in education are highly related. These initiatives fall into four main categories: providing more nutritious food to schoolchildren, offering greater opportunities for physical activity, providing obesity-related health services, and promoting healthy lifestyle choices.

The Role of Food at School

Schoolchildren consume between 20 and 50 percent of their daily food intake while at school. The first way in which schools can help reduce obesity is in the type of foods they serve to children. Children who eat nutritious breakfasts have better cognitive skills and eating a healthy breakfast is also associated with eating fewer calories overall in the day. While many children eat breakfast at home and eat home-prepared lunches either at home or at school, the majority of schools provide sponsored meal programs for both breakfast and lunch. Some schools provide snacks and some schools also provide after-school snacks and dinners in aftercare programs.

School breakfasts and lunches must meet federal nutrition standards, and the sale of certain foods such as soft drinks, water ices, and certain candies during mealtimes is prohibited. However, at other times when food is allowed for sale, there are fewer restrictions and requirements and dietary guidelines do not have to be followed. This means, for example, that while a school cafeteria may not sell soft drinks, sodas can be purchased from vending machines located just outside the cafeteria doors. Some argue that federal standards are inadequate, and stricter state and local regulations should exist.

For budgetary reasons, many schools continue to sell popular but nutritionally poorer foods à la carte in cafeterias, vending machines, snack bars, or for fund-raisers. When children want fries for lunch, if the school cafeteria does not sell them, children may go to a local vendor off school premises. These noncontrolled foods, which are called competitive foods, are not subject to the same regulated dietary guidelines. Availability of these foods increases with age, with almost all high schools offering these kinds of food for sale. The more available these competitive foods are, the less fruit and vegetables are sold and the more fat and calories are consumed.

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