I don’t think it makes THAT big of a difference. My school lunches weren’t healthy and they weren’t usually very tasty either. I don’t really know where the kids were that enjoyed eating them, really I don’t even know if anyone enjoyed them. But Taco Day was good.

I think the problem is no one walks anywhere anymore, and no one exercises, and when they leave school instead of a cooked meal, McDonalds is dinner.

what makes a difference isn’t what kids eat at school, it’s the monumental failure of parents to get your kid to do anything aside from video games and the internet, why play outside when you can shoot stuff inside?

There are just so many choices now.
I read details of a study (it was presented in my diet class and I don’t remember who did it or when) that showed that whenmore choices that are presented, more calories are consumed.
Visit a grocery store in France and compare it to one in the US and you will see that we have way more options, especially in the processed food catagory. I remember driving across town to go to the first Wendy’s and it was a treat. In many busy families fast processed food was the norm. Heck, when I was a kid, TV dinners were a treat. Now a cooked, sit down meal is a treat.
I don’t know the answers, but for me, I’m sticking to the perimeter of the grocery store and not even looking at that processed crap. I lost 80 lbs and it is a struggle every day when those crappy choices keep throwing themselves in my face!

I know at my elementary schools in the late 70s-early 80s, our “hamburgers” were actually made of soy. And the serving sizes were a lot smaller. The veggies were grey-looking, and there was a lot of white bread-based stuff, like the “pizza.” Our desserts were more like some hardtack-seeming cookie. Pfft. And then, we were told that ketchup was a vegetable. Hahaha! By 7th grade, I started bringing a bag lunch until I graduated high school.

Plus, at home, we were too poor to be allowed to stuff our faces. Even when I worked at McDonald’s as a teen, the rank and file workers were not allowed anything on the menu more than a (now) child size fries, a cheeseburger, and the (now) child size drink.

And @deni is right. I had gym every day, and recess twice a day in elementary school. In high school, it wasn’t just gym daily, the culture of both my high schools shunned those who weren’t on some sort of sport, so I was on field hockey, track and soccer teams and, uh, manager of the varsity boys swim team. Don’t US school participate in the President’s Physical Fitness Test anymore? I remember doing that every year until I graduated.

We certainly got a lot more exercise when I was in school. My Mom used to give me a PB&J sandwich, a carrot, and an apple. I got the milk at school. That was lunch. No cookies, no candy, no coke. In some circles today that would be considered child abuse. It’s pretty simple: Calories in is ”+” . Exercise is ” – ” If the ”+” is greater than the ”-”, you gain weight. Do you know how kids get obese? One gram at a time.
The scale does not lie.
Here’s your new UltiKiller7 game. Have a cookie or two while you play!

@Judi 80 pounds, that’s amazing.

@all I heard that there was a suggestion to limit calories in restaurant meals.

I really think people have no concept of a normal portion, I am reluctant to think it is from HFCS and hydrogenated oils, because I grew up on coke after the change from sugar and Fleishman’s margarine. I think those things are bad for you, but I don’t think they make you fatter than sugar and other fats, I just think they are horrible for your arteries and other health problems.

Now therer is a suggestion that exercise doesn’t help you lose weight. I think there was a thread on that. It makes no sense…look at any dancer or runner and tell me the exercise doesn’t help.

I think the quick fix of processed foods has done us in (excess calories from fat and high fructose corn syrup, loads of salt), but I think the main culprit is the severe decrease in physical activity. Growing up, I know we got TONS more exercise than kids do these days. Most play was done outside, usually various kinds of physical activity.

To contrast, my sister will be 10 in a couple of months and she would sit on her butt and watch TV or play video games all day if you let her. She’s always loved TV, but at earlier ages when she was too young for video games, she was loads more physically active and played outside most of the day. Consequently, she’s lost her athletic physique and even though her diet hasn’t really changed, she has become slightly pudgy.

Do you think the new era of “stranger danger” also contributes to less activity? I used to get up in the summer, go to the park, run home to eat and come back when it got dark. No cell phone, and this was when I was 5 and six! These days my mom would be arrested for neglect! But I was at least outside and playing. I am not advocating what my mom did, but has our fear gone a little out of control where we won’t let our kids play outside?

@Judi yes, yes, yes. Everyone is afraid of everything and everyone nowaday. Not that that fear is never legitimate, but most of the times I think we worry for nothing…

@Judi YES! I saw some study that 80% of children walked to school 30 years ago and now 20% do, or something like that, my numbers are off by a few percentage points. It is ridiculous. I can see having a buddy system rule for your kids, that you can’t walk alone maybe, but children don’t walk at all in many suburbs I think. Not anywhere. Their parents drive them everywhere and then parents complain about having to chaperone everyone.

OMG yes school lunches have changed drasticly. They are no longer actual cooked meals most of the time. Usually something like chicken nuggets with corn and ff’s maybe a fruit. All starch. Plus the fact that most schools only have one recess per day for the kids now so they sit all day in a desk without much activity. And alot of schools have PE only a couple of days a week.

Our kids are spending there entire day sitting on their bottoms at school and with the amount of homework given now they have to spend their evenings sitting getting it done so they are not getting the exercise we did as kids. Also the heat in the summer is much higher now due to global warming so it is diffucult for them to spend alot of time outside doing anything.

No Child Left Unfattened?

@chell I wonder if it matters greatly where you live? Or, where you grew up for that matter. I’m thinking lunches might vary significantly around the country. I don’t think of my lunches when I was a child in school as being cooked meals really, I’m 41. I see your new to Fluther :) you’ll love it.

I’m not crazy about the school lunches my kids get, but they aren’t as bad as they could be. Each lunch has fruits and vegetables, which sounds great until you realize that they aren’t usually fresh fruits and vegetables. There are more baked things than fried, but considering that the school is serving hundreds of lunches a day, they mainly use over-processed foods. The school lets kids have extra servings of fruits and veggies (excluding potatoes) for no additional cost. At least at the grade school and middle school, there are no soda or snack machines. Certain days of the week, kids can bring in money to buy ice cream or a cookie. They can’t use their lunch cards, because the school wants parents to have some control over whether or not the kids are allowed to have those things. Like a kid can’t manage to sneak 75 cents to school on ice cream day without Mom noticing.

I don’t really remember school lunches when I was young, other than the “soyburgers” as well called them, or the ever-popular pizza on Fridays. In high school, my lunch consisted of a Coke and a Nutty Bar from the snack machines almost every single day. :P I don’t know if school lunches are any healthier, but there is certainly more of an effort to make them seem healthier.

Today, my daughter’s middle school offered cheese ravioli, salad, and a dinner roll for the regular hot lunch. They also have other “stations” where kids can choose sandwiches, burgers, pizza, salad, bread, and hot vegetables. They do have a choice of white or whole grain breads. My daughter had cheese pizza, french fries, and pineapple for lunch. She then bought herself a cookie. We had a talk about what the other options were, but I don’ t know if it sunk in.

As for physical activity, that’s probably the key. We try to keep the kids active as much as we can. We do a lot of hiking, biking, and swimming in the summer. In grade school, they have gym twice a week and recess every day. In middle school, they have gym class every day for an hour. They don’t have sports teams (it’s a lower middle school), but they offer intramural sports each trimester.

Really, the responsibility lays solely with the parents. A nice balance between activities and down time, teaching good choices (which I clearly failed when it comes to french fries), and setting limits on electronic entertainment.

As a side note, parents who worry about letting their kids play outside alone should read Free Range Kids. It takes a realistic, and very funny, look at parental paranoia.

Oh, I forgot to say that about half the time my kids pack a lunch that very closely resembles @Lupin ‘s lunches from his mom! No soda, no candy, no treats. Always fresh fruit, maybe yogurt, and some kind of mostly healthy sandwich. I looooove PB&J!

With government purchasing it is hard for cafeterias to control the quality of what they get. The chicken nuggets where I work range from pretty good to inedible rubbery sponges.

I almost have to laugh about “when you were young”. In the 1950’s most of the kids who went to my school brought their own, fairly healthy, lunches to school. Only the poor kids (free lunch) and the ones whose parents worked ate the school lunch. School lunches were packed with government surplus foods such as peanut butter, cheese and other milk products.

School lunches are the same. As others have stated above, it’s the lack of exercise and lack of home cooked meals that is causing obesity.

In the summer, my kids never want to go outside… “it’s too hot” they say. During the school year, my oldest is doing homework until 11pm nearly every night. The younger two don’t have it quite so bad, but homework does take quite a chunk of their ‘free’ time. And then yes, there is the paranoia factor. They can only go so far from the house, etc., unless in a large group. I miss the days of leaving at dawn and coming home by dark, but I don’t think I could stand it if my kids did that!

The problem lies in many areas, and I think school lunches are the least of the problem. They certainly have changed the menu since I went to school (Remember hamburger SOS anyone? I LOVED that stuff!.) I don’t think they’re as fattening. But the biggest problem, as everyone is pointing out, is the lack of exercise, combined with this crazy idea now a days that we have to eat more than we need to. Can’t have just a hamburger, you gotta have a big Mac AND you gotta have fries with that. AND you have to super size them. Once upon a time you could only get only one kind of hamburger from Mickey D’s—a little one, and it cost $.35. Then they introduced their Big Macs,and everybody wants to out do that…...They feed and feed and feed us. Parents push their kids to eat, which simply causes eating issues. Why wouldn’t a kid eat if they’re hungry? It’s gotten all messed up!

Fact from fiction, truth from diction. The school lunches I remember was nothing like what I seen on Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution. We did not have tater tots, pizza more than once a week lucky if we seen it once a month no choice of milk other than white whole milk, burgers were few and far between, NO fries. There was dessert I remember but it was always made from scratch, no Twinkies, Ho Hos nothing bought. From the time I was in 1st grade all the way out 6th grade there were only 2 kids considered fat in all the classes in every grade and by today’s standard they would not be fat but “chunky”. No one dared to be fat unless they wanted to get their butt kicked on the way home every day. If you were fat you got picked last for kick ball etc if you got picked at all. Most of us within ¾ of a mile walked to school. I was walking to school when I was 7 or 8, as @deni pointed out people today or so terrified that the boogie man is behind every bush parents feel safer driving their kids to school to give the douche bag drunk a shot at the whole family.

When we got home we didn’t have PCs, Xboxes, and DVDs to capture us and hold us in a chair. We got together and played pick up football games, war games, and many other physical things, we were not couch potatoes.

The fear of the boogie man made parents keep their kids inside and in front of the TV, PC, or video game and guess where a lot of snacking happened?