That’s a great article. It really demonstrates how complicated it can be to come to universal agreement regarding how to eat properly. Even if we could all agree on which foods are considered healthy or unhealthy (which I don’t think is likely), there’s still the rest of healthy eating to contend with, like balance, moderation, portion control, etc. I find it presumptuous that someone can think that they are qualified to make all of those complicated and personal decisions for other people’s children without any education or training on the matter simply because they are teachers.
Sorry, Elret–it’s Odesio who, by using that absurd sugar-cereal-marketing phrase “part of a nutritionally sound diet,” shows that I won’t find conversation with him productive. A glass of rum can be part of a nutritionally sound diet, but that doesn’t mean I’ll let a kid break out the Captain Morgan at the lunch table.
As I was saying before, if you can declare some things obviously unhealthy, that’s a start. It’s foolish to let the perfect be the enemy of the good: if we can’t create a comprehensive list of good vs. bad foods, that’s no reason not to prohibit the foods that are definitely on the less-healthful end of the spectrum.
Is this a private religious school, or a public school?
But it is! It’s a really good reason, actually. By flat out banning really obvious unhealthy stuff while allowing equally unhealthy stuff that doesn’t happen to fall into the obvious categories, you are teaching kids that the latter is healthy. How can you not see how damaging that is?
You’re also ignoring all aspects of healthy eating except elimination of unhealthy stuff. So Susie from the example above with her salad and chicken and small chocolate bar is restricted, but Jimmy can bring nothing but a banana every day, and Frankie can have six pounds of cheese, three pitas, two yogurts and a granola bar? Does that make sense to you? Eating that much or that little food is clearly more unhealthy than Susie’s little treat, so why arbitrarily decide “no junk” is some kind of magic catch-all rule that will somehow churn out adults who know how to eat a balanced diet without food issues? Why not decide “only 500 calories”? Why not “must include all food groups”? It can’t just be “no candy & chips” while allowing food that is no better, overeating, undereating, or lack of balance.
I’ll quit asking you to give me some examples of what you think would be acceptable, but the reason I was asking is because I truly think you have oversimplified the reality in your mind. It seems basic on its face: sure, kids are probably fine to not eat junk at school. But in reality without consistency, it’s difficult and pointless. You keep waving away my yogurt example, but don’t seem to see how it destroys the entire concept of bothering to have such a rule in the first place, and in fact probably does more damage than no rule at all.
You want to teach kids to eat healthy, it has to be a comprehensive, well researched endeavor developed at a level way above the individual teacher in the classroom, and even still I don’t think it’s a good idea. There are just too many variables between each individual to have a blanket decision about the right way for each person to eat, and as much judgement as teachers may have, until they are trained nutritionists I maintain that the best person to decide an individual child’s diet is his or her parent.
None whatsoever. At this point I think you’re coming up with increasingly ridiculous hypotheticals, and I’m not really interested in them.
Yes, it’s the start of letting people tell you what to do.
Explain the difference between a school dictating what adults can feed their children and a government restricting foods that can be purchased by adults.
When I was a kid it was nothing for me to eat 3 bowls of Extra Frosted Krusty flakes in the morning and after school eat a bowl of ice cream, a bag of potato chips and a bottle of pop. Lunch would have been a sandwich, piece of fruit, milk and chips. dinner would have been a typical meat and potatoes with a vegetable.
I left HS weighing 135 lbs without an ounce of fat on me. My mother stuffed me with enough of the “good foods” to build the muscle that burned everything else.
The function of schools is that of teaching institution. Teaching kids how to cook and what constitutes good nutrition falls within those boundaries and make no mistake, schools should have boundaries. If we dictate choices away from children (and their parents) then we are raising sheep.
Its not a start its just plain wrong. Snickers bars are not inherently unhealthy, teaching kids this is incorrect as teaching them an other blatantly untrue fact.
Wow, really? I’ll apologize for my hyperbole, but my yogurt example that you keep dismissing is neither hypothetical nor hyperbolic, yet you refuse to address it, and I keep asking you to provide your own examples, yet you refuse to do that either. So because my examples are not literal enough for you, you will not address the points I have been trying to make? I am genuinely interested in your point of view on this, and feel badly that you are washing your hands of the conversation because of the way I have attempted to illustrate my point.
I will try to explain my point to you one more time, without any examples.
Junk food is not healthy.
Overeating is not healthy.
Undereating is not healthy.
Not eating a wide variety of foods is not healthy.
If a school is going to purport to endorse “healthy eating” at school, it is arbitrary and damaging to address only one of those issues, and presumptuous and insulting to attempt to do so without being educated on the subject.
If you will be willing to give it another go, I am really interested in what purpose exactly you think a “no candy and chips” rule serves.
This is the straw man at the center of the debate. In my Hobbit example, I was no more dictating what a dad could read to his kid than I would hypothetically be dictating to adults what they could feed their children. Instead, I was telling the kid what he could read when I was acting in loco parentis; I might similarly tell a kid what he could eat when I was acting in loco parentis.
If you don’t like my reading instruction, you have limited choices. I assume the same would apply if you don’t like my eating instruction.
I didn’t refuse to address it. Ctrl+F for Gogurt. I admitted it would be an imperfect policy, but whereas you seem to think that an imperfect policy is necessarily worse than no policy at all, I maintain that an imperfect policy can potentially be better than no policy at all.
Schools are not substitute parents. As listed above, they could not begin to provide the calories I burned with the school-knows-best attempt at parenting. And it’s not their function to feed children therefore it’s not their function to dictate what a child eats.
I would argue it is not the school’s business except in two extreme circumstances:
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The school rightfully should ban products known to be dangerous to other children for allergy-related reasons, and
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The school should do something if the child is bringing something (or nothing, as the case may be) that is so lacking that the child is hungry and can’t participate appropriately in the afternoon.
Beyomnd that I don’t know how you can get past the simple problem that the school cannot possibly assess the nutritional value of everyone’s lunch with anything approximating a degree of reliability. There’s also the fact that people do eat junk food from time to time and it’s not a big deal. The kid didn’t bring a jumbo sized Ruffles and a keg of Coke.
Yes, I absolutely think an imperfect policy is worse than no policy at all.
What good do you think such a policy teaches?
The bad thing I think it teaches is that a kid has the following facts:
- My school has a “healthy eating” policy.
- Under this policy, my small candy bar is not allowed. (Ergo, candy is unequivicably bad.)
- Under this policy, friend A’s yogurt is allowed. (Ergo, yogurt is unequivicably good.)
- Under this policy, friend B is allowed to bring large amounts of the non-restricted food. (Ergo, as long as a food is “healthy”, I can eat as much as I want)
- Under this policy, friend C is allowed to bring the same item of the non-restricted food every day. (Ergo, as long as I avoid the “unhealthy” foods, I am eating healthy.)
The vast majority of people (kids included) already know that candy and chips in excess are not healthy. Most people (including experts) believe that treats in moderation is in fact healthier than complete elimination. What is the lesson here? Not one of the other four conclusions that can come from the policy in its imperfect state is accurate, and all (especially the last three) are absolutely so, so much worse than not having a policy at all.
Why do you think the imperfect policy is better than no policy? Please tell me what benefit a child operating under this policy has, compared to a child who goes to a school with no policy at all?
I haven’t really mentioned my youngest kid’s preschool’s lunch requirements, because it’s a private preschool and therefore not one of the public schools we’ve been discussing here. But in a bit of what I personally consider irony, they have banned parents from sending in anything with artificial sweeteners in their kids’ lunches, on the grounds that artificial sweeteners are unhealthy.
So, amusingly to me, I can send my kid in with a sweetened yogurt cup that is laden with processed sugars and artificial colors/flavoring and that’s A-OK, no problem. If I send him in with an artificially sweetened yogurt, which is less caloric and has much less impact on your blood glucose levels, that’s not OK.
It’s a totally arbitrary standard, and they are overriding my wishes as a parent in order to enforce this arbitrary standard. Now, I don’t really care, because my kid tends not to be hungry at preschool lunchtime, and I pick him up at 12:30 anyway, so I just send him in with half a sandwich and a fruit cup, and feed him the rest of his lunch at home. But the policy is silly and annoying.
Edit: I should point out that I don’t buy artificially sweetened yogurts for my kids’ benefit. I buy them because I’m diabetic and they’re easier on my blood sugar, and I can’t be arsed to buy two different kinds of yogurt at the store, because I’m lazy.
How incredibly rude. Fine, have it your way.
You were instructing whoever it was who chose the book. Likely both the boy and the dad participated in the choice, so when a new choice is being made, I’m pretty sure your instruction to the boy will get heard by the dad. Either way, this is a completely legitimate instruction because it deals with the choice of book directly interfering with the son’s studies. Hopefully, the dad takes the instruction to heart when helping choose the next book.
I highly doubt that a cookie in a kid’s lunch box is going to interfere with whatever lesson on nutrition you have planned for the day. You and I both know that this has very little to do with nutritional studies, it is the school deciding that they know the best way to feed children, and parents need to be forced to follow their food choices.
It muddles the line between School as Parent and Parent as Parent. The school should be responsible for providing a safe and productive environment for children to study. As long as the parent’s choices do not interfere with this (like in your example above), leave the parenting to the parent.
This bit is true:
This bit is patently false:
For the umpteenth time. There is NOTHING inherently “unhealthy” about junk food. If you tell kids that you are lying to them plain and simple.
Oh, I totally agree that it’s not inherently unhealthy and I absolutely think it has a place in a healthy diet. I just meant that if you are going to take it upon yourself to educate children in so-called healthy eating, then discussion of the relative nutritional benefits of various foods is only part of the picture, and it’s naive and ignorant to neglect the rest of it.
Last week I had no bread, so I let her eat cake for lunch instead! 
(hey tere was an apple and a string cheese in there too, ok and a small orange sodapop.)
Snooping in lunch bags looking for junk food violations is nutter!
Our schools have a healthy food policy, all their hot lunches have been revamped, focusing on whole grains, fresh fruits, dark leafy greens and locally sourced michigan food products. Even the bake sales need to have an emphasis on healthy recipes. Seems successful so far, my kid likes the food a whole lot better than before and she is picky.
But the school has no comment or policy on what parents are packing in the brown bags.
Ditto for my HS experience. Out of curiosity, when was this? I was in HS from 84-88. M&Ms, Snickers, Twix, etc for 50¢ a crack. I was in school from 8 am until 6 pm, typically, and relied on those to just make it through the day.