School cafeterias are swapping dino-shaped chicken fingers for carrot purees. They’re trading mac ’n’ cheese for kale salsa and replacing potato chips with green smoothies.
These lunchrooms are part of a pilot program that FoodCorps, a national nonprofit that promotes healthy foods in schools, launched in March in partnership with Sweetgreen, a fast-casual salad chain. The program, Reimagining School Cafeterias, advocates for the adoption of locally grown produce in schools and offers curricula that emphasizes the importance of healthy eating. The goal is to give students more control over designing healthy school menus.
In March, Sweetgreen pledged $1 million to create scalable healthy eating and educational programming in 50 school cafeterias by 2020. Reimagining School Cafeterias builds off a previous nutrition-based curriculum of theirs called Sweetgreen in Schools. Sweetgreen in Schools launched in 2010 and reached 9,000 students. The new initiative aims to expand the number of students they reach and create demographic-specific learning opportunities for the students.
“In order for students to really want to eat healthier options, they have to be able to create the meals themselves,” Sweetgreen co-founder Nate Ru told FastCompany.
School lunches in America are frequently criticized for being unhealthy, as they tend to be high in fat, sugar and salt. The Center for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that one out of every five schoolaged children is obese, a figure that’s tripled since the 1970s.
“We know that school cafeterias are an incredibly powerful place to connect kids with healthy food,” FoodCorps co-founder and executive director Curt Ellis told FastCompany. “There are over 100,000 school cafeterias in the country — seven times more than the number of McDonalds.”
Reimagining School Cafeterias is currently being piloted in three schools that all vary in terms of geography and socioeconomic status. In the 2019-2020 school year, organizers say the program will expand to 6,500 students at 15 schools. The year after, it will be implemented in 50 schools and will reach an estimated 22,000 students.
At Aberdeen Elementary School, a pilot program in Aberdeen, North Carolina, students are trying veggies cooked in new ways. For example, students traded in raw carrots for carrots that had been roasted or pureed, with the goal of showing students different ways that produce can be prepared. After each taste test, the students vote for a favorite. That winner will be incorporated into the school’s lunch menu. In the coming months, they’ll try asparagus and peas cooked in unfamiliar ways.
In New Mexico’s Navajo Nation territory, the focus is on flavor. Students at Wingate Elementary School are learning to use spices to create new tastes to complement traditional school-lunch vegetables.
Finally, in Oakland, California, at Laurel Elementary School, students look at the big picture, with a focus on how they might improve their cafeteria. Students redesign table layouts and lunch menus. They will work with Sweetgreen and partner organizations to get those ideas implemented in the coming months.
“There are 30 million children a day who walk in the front doors of our nation’s schools. Those kids are going there to learn but they are also going there to eat,” Ellis told Forbes. “If we care about the next generation of kids and their health and long-term potential, we better fix school food.”
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Tag: obesity
How a Few Legendary Rappers and 1 Cool Doctor are Creating Better Health Outcomes for Inner City Kids
Dr. Olajide Williams is a neurologist and a hip hop fan. Doug E. Fresh is an critically-acclaimed rapper and an avid health nut. When the two paired up to produce, “Stroke Ain’t No Joke,” a song aimed at educating young people about the warning signs of a stroke, in 2005, it was a match made in heaven. “I would be working all day here, then head to Doug’s studio and work all night until we came up with the song,” says Williams. “It’s still my favorite song to this day.”
The song’s release led to the founding of Hip Hop Public Health, a campaign that uses animation, songs and live performances to educate low-income children and families about healthy living. Since 2008, the group has performed in more than 150 schools, teaching an estimated 44,000 kids about strokes, obesity, diabetes and Alzheimer’s disease.
Hip Hop Public Health recently launched an ambassador program, placing their materials online and encouraging educators and artists from around the world to use its model.
This New Federal Program Provides Better Food to Low-Income Individuals
A new federal program will allow low-income families to eat healthier food and spur the local economy at the same time.
The Food Insecurity Nutrition Incentive (FINI), approved alongside this year’s Farm Bill, will put $100 million over the next five years into the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program (SNAP, aka food stamps). As CBS News reports, the money will go towards programs such as Double Up Food Bucks, which allows farmer’s markets to match the amount a SNAP recipient might spend, meaning they can double up on fresh fruits and vegetables. According to NPR, the $100 million will also be matched by private funding, so there’s a potential of $200 million going towards the program.
Crossroads Farmers Market, outside of Washington D.C., is one of the many farmer’s markets that already run a similar program. Rosie Sanchez, a SNAP recipient and market volunteer, tells NPR that the program “is very important…You know why? Because I get up to $15 for free. So I have $30 every week. With my $30, I’m able to buy fresh, local — it’s not expensive. It’s the best!”
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The initiative is important because the average daily amount offered to low-income Americans through SNAP is only $4.50 a day. And because fruits and vegetables at the grocery store tend to be more expensive than, say, a bag of chips, recipients can develop health concerns due to poor diets, such as heart disease, diabetes or obesity. Thanks to the new program, SNAP recipients have effectively doubled their purchasing power for healthier fare.
A policy brief from the Union of Concerned Scientists and the Johns Hopkins Center found that “if Americans increased their daily consumption of these foods to meet federal dietary recommendations, the nation’s costs related to the treatment of cardiovascular disease alone could drop by $17 billion.”
Another plus with FINI is that it entices communities that are considered food deserts (low-income areas with limited access to fresh produce) to start farmer’s markets. Encouragingly, access to local fruits and vegetables is already increasing, the Project for Public Spaces (PPS) found that the number of farmer’s markets increased from 2,863 in 2000 to 7,175 in 2011.
An investment of $100 million over five years doesn’t sound like a lot of money when the payoff could be much bigger.
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How Mapping Health Data Can Reduce Childhood Obesity
There is no blanket solution when it comes to fighting childhood obesity, especially in an urban setting where diverse cultures, economic disparity and access to parks and fitness activities can create a complex web of challenges.
Add insight from an abundance of community stakeholders including educators, parents and local lawmakers and finding a single solution to combatting the problem is near impossible. But an Austin, Texas, nonprofit may have found the key to getting everyone’s attention when it comes to understanding the problem: Visualization.
Children’s Optimal Health (COH) is charged with improving health for the city’s youth, but the nonprofit discovered that identifying the problem meant looking at the issue on a neighborhood level. Thanks to a Texas law that requires public schools to record fitness data on every student, COH used the information to create maps that identify “hotspots” that include social and economic information, according to Government Technology.
“You don’t have to know English or have an education to see this and say, ‘Oh my gosh, that’s my neighborhood,’” said COH Executive Director Maureen Britton.
Through data-sharing agreements with more than 12 central Texas education and health entities, COH aggregates student information including BMI and cardiovascular fitness scores, geo-tagged by neighborhood. Student names are removed and the data is completely anonymous — focusing only on identifying the issues families in these local communities face. As the Austin tech sector continues to bring more business and more people to town, COH is committed to ensuring low-income residents don’t fall by the wayside.
“There’s not enough attention paid to the struggles in Austin as the population outside of the tech industry grows. That’s our concern,” Britton said. “The more we bring this data to life through the maps, the more we get data-driven information to the right people.”
COH is also able to overlay the student health maps with other data sets, creating more granular narratives to show how the city can improve wellness initiatives. For example, a neighborhood’s proximity to a concentration of fast food restaurants or a community’s crime rate could contribute to the area’s obesity rate.
But perhaps it’s COH’s ability to network institutions that may otherwise not collaborate that might be most impressive about the nonprofit, as Government Technology points out. For example, getting hospitals involved in changing school physical education curriculum or schools to engage in interventions for existing infrastructure are just a few examples of how COH has found a way to get all community stakeholders on the same page.
As more cities collaborate on civic innovation initiatives, officials should take note the power of a picture and how it can reshape the conversation.
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These Coaches Make Recess Work for Kids
Recess can be chaos.
As a result, disciplinary problems can lead schools to reduce playground outings significantly — if not eradicate them altogether. Just look at Seattle, where a new report from KUOW found that schools serving the poorest students might offer 15 minutes of outdoor play a day. And that’s if the kids are lucky.
The adults say it’s just too much trouble to let the children play on their own. But that’s backwards, experts say.
Nationally, almost 18 percent of kids ages six to 11 years old are obese, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Factor in adolescents, and the number of overweight or obese kids rises above one third. Physical activity during recess can help combat this. And adding to the importance of recess are studies that have found it can improve academic performance.
“Those students are the ones we also know have higher rates of obesity, and for whom academic achievement in school is even more important,” pediatrician Paula Lozano told the Seattle station, speaking about kids from low-income areas.
Across the county in the Bronx, New York, the group Asphalt Green may have a solution — turn recess into structured exercise time. Don’t call it physical education, like the dreaded gym class. This is supposed to be all fun and games, just with a very serious mission.
The nonprofit works with some 27,000 kids and can squeeze fitness fun into any hallway or corridor, a big plus for city schools often strained for space, organizers told the station. “Any space you give us, we can be active in,” says Arlen Zamula, the program’s Associate Director of the Recess Enhancement Program.
Asphalt Green’s programs may not look like the free-for-all tag games of yore, but organizers say they’re helping kids have fun while practicing fitness — and hopefully learning a truly life-long physical lesson in the process.
Can Living in a City Give You a Leg Up in Life?
We’ve been hearing for years that people who live in cities tend to be thinner and more active than those who live in suburbs—all that walking and climbing stairs seems to contribute—but a new study finds that people who live in densely-packed cities also are more likely to be agile in a different way: climbing the economic and social ladder.
The study by Smart Growth America and the University of Utah’s Metropolitan Urban Center is significant because it quantifies urban sprawl. Sprawl is not just about how much land is occupied by a city. As the authors write, “sprawl is not just growth, but is a specific, and dysfunctional, style of growth.” The study shows that the health benefits that correlate with city living are specific to dense cities, where residents have lower rates of obesity and diabetes. Residents of sprawled-out cities such as Atlanta do not show the same benefits as do those living in packed-in places such as New York.
Reid Ewing of the University of Utah, lead researcher on the study, told Lane Anderson of Deseret News, “Urban places provide higher likelihood of moving up the social ladder. Compact places provide better access to jobs, better transit and more integration.” The study judged Los Angeles to be relatively dense compared to Atlanta and other sprawling places, and found that a child in L.A. has a 10 percent chance of moving from the bottom of the income scale to the top, while an Atlanta-based low-income child has only a 4 percent of chance of such a rise.
Ewing said that one factor in this difference might be transportation—denser cities tend to have better public transportation, which gives citizens of all income levels more access to better jobs and schools, but is especially important for low-income people who may not have a car. Better mixing between people of different ethnicities and economic levels might contribute to the social mobility, too. “In dense areas, there are more chances for networking, for meeting people, more chances of getting better salaries and jobs,” he said. And riding the train also seems to keep people thinner—train riders are 6.5 pounds lighter than car drivers, according to The American Journal of Preventive Medicine, and they’re 81 percent less likely to ever become obese. One twist: the study found that kids get more exercise in the suburbs where they can run around in backyards and playgrounds, and adults get more exercise in cities, where they are forced to hoof it.
The authors of the study hope their findings will encourage more cities to implement healthy changes, such as bike-share programs, more mixed-use developments, and improved transportation. Or, as Ewing asks, “It’s time to ask the question again, how can we make cities better?”
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Does Taxing Soda Actually Improve Americans’ Health?
Obesity in America is an expensive problem—one analysis calculated the costs of obesity-related medical expenses at $147 billion in 2008. For years politicians have debated whether a tax on unhealthy items would help to turn the obesity rates around, and some cities have gone forward with proposing taxes on soda, including San Francisco, which will ask voters to decide on a soda tax on the November ballot.
But a new study from the National Bureau of Economic Research suggests that taxing any one food product often results in consumers switching to an equally unhealthy item. The report, entitled “The Effect of Prices on Nutrition: Comparing the Impact of Product- and Nutrient-Specific Taxes,” suggests that the better way to go would be to tax the precise ingredients that are detrimental to health—sugar, salt, and fat—as increases in these taxes do result in lowering the overall consumption of junk food.
The study, which analyzed 123 million food purchases, found that a 20% tax on sugar would result in a 16.41% drop in sugar consumption, while a 20% tax on soda would reduce soda purchases by about 4%, but might send soda lovers scurrying to other unhealthy options. The study’s authors conclude, “nutrient-specific taxes on sugar, fat or salt have much larger effects on nutrition than product-specific taxes on soda drinks or packaged food.”
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A No Brainer Job for Ex-Drill Sergeants: Motivating the Rest of Us
Valetta SuRae Stewart of District Heights, Md. served for 23 years in the Army, and left worried that the only skills she had to offer the civilian job market were “breaking things and killing people,” she told Lenny Bernstein of the Washington Post. But then she realized she’d developed an extremely valuable aptitude as a drill sergeant: She knew how to motivate people to lose weight and get in shape. In November, Stewart earned her certification as a personal trainer, entering a field that’s in high demand thanks to a Salute You Scholarship from the American Council on Exercise.
The program granted her $700, one of 226 scholarships it’s given out to veterans in the past six months, and G.I. Bill benefits helped her study at the National Personal Training Institute. Salute You has certified nine trainers including Stewart, and sets up vets with interviews at fitness centers with the overall goal of using veterans’ skills to fight the obesity epidemic. Stewart is now completing an apprenticeship at Atlas Fitness in Washington, D.C.
Stewart plans to become an all-around wellness consultant, a path that was inspired by her work as a hairdresser between stints in the military. When you fix hair, she told Bernstein, “You learn very, very intimate things about people. And everybody was broken. This one had heart disease; this one’s mother had just died from cancer, this one had high blood pressure. . . . That’s what sent me to nutrition.”
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