nutrition and physical activity in our schools - Environment & Human ...

The State of Nutrition and Physical Activity in Our Schools■At a mid-sized middle school in ERG D, with a studentpopulation of 570, the cafeteria staff found that servingsoups was a very popular way to entice students to eatvegetables. They began serving homemade, vegetable-basedsoups every day, with every meal. These soups includedtomato, mixed vegetable, and chicken vegetable, and werereported to be a big success.■Oil-fried French fries were so popular at many schools thatsome lunch monitors reported students buying lunches forthe fries only, and throwing everything else away. In schoolswhere fries were commonly served with lunch, students weresometimes forced to choose between fries and anothervegetable. One school lunch program found that it wasserving as many as 250 pounds of oil-fried French fries perday to just over 500 middle school students. In response,several schools have begun to remove fries from their lunchmenus, to bake them instead of frying them, or to includethem only on certain days of the week.At a mid-sized middleschool in ERG D,with a studentpopulation of 570,the cafeteria stafffound that servingsoups was a verypopular way to enticestudents to eatvegetables.■Some schools found salad bars to be a good way toencourage students to eat vegetables. In a number of cases,the salad bar even included a protein (such as cups of tuna,cheese, or grilled chicken) and a grain (such as a roll orbread), so that the salad bar itself contained all thecomponents of a qualifying lunch. Salad bars were oftensupervised by the lunch monitors, and were reported to bevery popular with students.35