Kids looking for a sugary, salty or soda-y pick-me-up in Massachusetts won't be finding it in school vending machines or a la carte cafeteria lines starting in 2012-13. State health regulators this week took a hard line in setting standards for school nutrition. They're also emphasizing low-fat snacks, whole-grain baked items and fruits and vegetables.
They left the menus in the main cafeteria alone, since those are governed by federal standards. And that is changing, too, with plans by the U.S. Department of Agriculture to require more fruits and vegetables while reducing salt and fat.
School lunch has been a hot topic for a number of years now. Utah is one of the states that has wrestled hard with questions of how to get students to eat the "good" foods that have been placed on the school menus. But it has, like many other states, also largely opted to keep vending machines that sell nutritionally challenged fare in order to hang onto needed revenue.
School districts like Canyons and Davis go to great lengths to provide foods that help children be healthy, but still watch tons of it get thrown away or ignored, they told the Deseret News.
The Massachusetts health officials are planning to ban sweetened, flavored milk, as well, but have put that off for a year while they figure out how to get their youthful charges to drink plain milk, according to an article in the Boston Globe.
The rest of the changes will go into effect during the 2012-2013 school year.
Anne Marie Stronach, director of the school district's nutrition services in Lawrence, Mass., told the Public Health Council and the Boston Globe that studies showed students choose their milk primarily based on how it is packaged. They watched as students regularly chose the milk in blue cartons during a visual survey.
"It had nothing to do with the milk, but the color of the carton," she said. "We removed whole milk and we didn't see any decrease in the consumption."What might decrease, she said, is revenue for schools that depend on sales of some of the soon-to-be-gone food products to provide a portion of their budgets.
It's an interesting time in the debate on milk and whether chocolate and other flavors are good or bad. Some experts say the need for calcium and vitamin D is so great that it outweighs worries about the extra calories. Others disagree. In April, some school districts nationwide were banning the flavored milk while others that had done so earlier were trying to figure out how to re-introduce it into their food programs.
For example, schools in Fairfax and D.C. banned the flavored milks from schools; some of them are more recently "reconsidering bringing a different version of chocolate milk back to their schools," according to a roundup of coverage on the topic.
Flavored milk gets a bad rap, compared to what it provides in the way of nutrition, according to some experts. The Milk Processor Education Program reported on a study that was conducted across the country in 58 elementary and secondary schools. It found that "when flavored milk was not available, many children chose not to drink milk and missed out on the essential nutrients that milk provides. On days when only white milk was offered in cafeterias, milk consumption dropped an average of 35 percent."
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