WASHINGTON – Iowa Democrat Tom Harkin’s passionate about an effort to create national nutrition standards in schools—and he’s pushing for a funding increase that would result in healthier food options in school cafeterias.
“There are certain things we ought to be spending money on,” Sen. Harkin said.
What we feed our children has been a growing concern among parents for years. Lawmakers are now looking at ways to combat childhood obesity and hunger – two issues at opposite ends of the spectrum but that both affect millions of children.
“We’ve always been penny wise and pound foolish about these things. If we have unhealthy kids now, we’re going to have unhealthy adults down the road,” Harkin said.
How significant is the problem? In 2007, 26.5 percent of Iowa children between the ages of 10 and 17 were overweight or obese, according to the National Survey of Children’s Health. That’s up one full percentage point from the previous year and could keep climbing.
Being “too fat to fight” can impact nation’s security
It might take a stretch of thinking to associate childhood obesity with national security, but experts say this is a serious problem that is already affecting the military.
Recent data from the Department of Defense showed that 27 percent of all Americans aged 17 are 24 are too overweight to enlist, posing a potential threat to military strength.
During World War II, the school lunch program was established after young draftees were revealed to have malnutrition-related health problems; at least 40 percent of rejected recruits were turned away on basis of poor nutrition.
“Today, it is obesity that threatens the overall health of America and the future strength of our military,” said Retired Army Maj. Gen. Paul D. Monroe. “This all-too-common disqualifier is limiting the pool of available recruits and eroding our military readiness.”
Concannon said that he could see obesity as a national security issue and fixing the problem now would have a host of benefits.
“We want to reduce health care costs over the long term, preserve quality of life, make sure a whole cohort of young people are healthier for their own sake, and should they elect to join the military, they’ll be able to do so,” Concannon said.
Congress is updating its childhood nutrition bill from 2005 to award more money to foster healthy eating in schools, as well as provide nutritious school breakfast and lunch programs. The Senate passed its version of the bill Aug. 5. The House must now OK its version of the bill before President Barack Obama can sign it into law.
The Senate bill includes the adoption of national food nutrition standards for schools and new money for healthier options in school cafeterias. The price tag on the Senate bill is $4.5 billion; the House bill, in its current form, is about $8 billion. The two sides will need to reconcile how much funding the nutrition act will eventually get.
In any case, there’s bound to be an impact.
“I think it’s going to be considerably better because it not only makes improvements on the child nutrition act of five years ago, but it provides us a platform to implement the recommendations of the Institute of Medicine to improve school meals,” said Kevin Concannon, under secretary for Food, Nutrition, and Consumer Services in the United States Department of Agriculture.
A 2009 study in the journal Health Affairs concluded that the costs of hospitalizations related to childhood obesity rose from $125.9 million in 2001 to $237.6 million in 2005.
“The basic package of school meals has not been improved since 1995,” Concannon said. “The recommendations that will be supported by the Child Nutrition Act will be increased funding for schools, particularly for school lunch programs, and improving the meal quality of school meals.”
A 2009 study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, based on figures collected in 2006, found that the direct and indirect cost of obesity is as high as $147 billion annually.
Iowa’s efforts to aid childhood nutrition
Iowa has been making strides in getting kids healthier through participation in a couple programs that are not tied to congressional efforts.
One program, Team Nutrition, is a USDA-sponsored nutritional health plan that involves schools, parents and the community. The aim is to educate children and make school meals healthier. It is available across the country.
“Any school can be a Team Nutrition school by filling out an enrollment form and getting it signed by the principal and food service director,” said Carrie Scheidel, Team Nutrition project co-director for the Iowa Department of Education. “What they put in the application [to receive a mini-grant] has to support school wellness.”
Not everyone can get breakfast at school
Breakfast has long been touted as “the most important meal of the day.” Supporters of the Child Nutrition Reauthorization Act want to make sure children have the option of eating this meal at school, since breakfast can fall into one of the “gap periods” in which children might not have access to a nutritious meal.
“On school days, almost two-thirds of children who participate in the lunch program do not participate in the school breakfast program,” said Thomas Vilsack, Secretary of Agriculture.
While lunch is served in about 100,000 schools, the breakfast program is available in only 88,000, Vilsack said.
Eating school breakfast “boosts academic performance and reduces absenteeism, nurse visits, discipline problems and obesity,” said James D. Weill, president of the Food Research and Action Center, a national anti-hunger lobbying group.
Breakfast at school has its detractors as well, who cite the costs and its lack of effectiveness.
A study done by Mathematica Policy Research found that full-time participation in the school breakfast program, which costs about $325 a year per child, would reduce a middle-school kid’s weight by three to four pounds. To maintain the weight reduction, a child must participate in the program each year.
Robert Rector, a research fellow at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think-tank based in Washington, said that aside from the high cost of school breakfast per child, the program isn’t effective because it is feeding children who don’t need it to eat.
“Nine out of 10 children would have eaten a good breakfast at home anyway,” Rector said. “So the cost of providing one meal to that one child who wouldn’t have eaten is $18 per day.”
But the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Kevin Concannon emphasized that the breakfast program served healthy foods for children.
“This is not serving Twinkies, it’s not filling kids up with unhealthy foods,” Concannon said.
In 2009, Iowa schools received $349,685 from Team Nutrition. Schools can decide individually what they do with the grants they receive, as long as it corresponds to USDA standards.
North-Linn High School in Coggon, Iowa, adopted a school wellness program and purchased a milk vending machine. The students have been solely responsible for promoting the milk machine to other students. North-Linn’s future plans include a 5K community walk to raise awareness and money for an area health organization and a free breakfast cereal morning.
Scheidel said that student involvement seems to be the key to success for getting kids to think healthier.
“We’ve been thoroughly impressed with how interested and engaged the students are in supporting healthy lifestyles,” Scheidel said. “They are more open to change than we thought, especially if you involve them in the process.”
Iowa’s state legislation also signed the Healthy Kids Act in 2008 and has begun to update nutrition requirements for schools and to establish physical activity requirements for students from kindergarten through 12th grade. Iowa’s Area Education Agencies are now also required to contract with a licensed dietician.
It’s not clear how the Child Nutrition Reauthorization Act, which will establish federal standards apart from those mandated by Iowa, will affect the state, said Elaine Watkins-Miller, public information officer for the Iowa Department of Education.
“It all depends on the final form of the bill,” Watkins-Miller said. “We’re already making some movement with the Healthy Kids Act, so I think we’d just continue that. We’re just waiting and seeing before we speculate on what the full affect [of the bill] would be on Iowa.”
Scheidel is optimistic that the new nutritional standards set by federal and state legislation will have a positive impact.
“We hope it sets some groundwork for them to make healthy changes now,” Scheidel said. “We hope it will be something that sticks with them over the long run.”
Kevin Concannon
Kevin Concannon, under secretary of Food, Nutrition and Consumer Services at the USDA
USDA Undersecretary Kevin Concannon discusses the impact of educating children about nutrition (Mary Beth Nevulis/MNS)