New School Lunch Guidelines: One Size Can’t Fit All

School lunch reform has been needed for a long time, and new rules are finally coming into effect this fall.  Under the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act of 2010, some significant changes to school lunch have been made and are taking effect for the first time this year.  One of the many (and certainly most controversial) changes brought by this Act is the calorie restrictions:   650 calories for elementary-schoolers, 700 for middle-schoolers and 850 for high-schoolers.

That seems reasonable, right?  In a country facing an obesity epidemic, monitoring kids’ caloric intake sounds like a step in the right direction.

The problem, though, is that one size just doesn’t fit all when it comes to calories.

Even the most health-conscious among us harbor a lot of misperceptions about how many calories we need on a daily basis – calorie counting is a complicated business.  Caloric intake isn’t a flat number.  Prove it to yourself:  take a visit to the Mayo Clinic calorie counter.  The calorie counter takes a number of factors into account to determine the appropriate caloric intake for an individual.  Age, gender, weight, height and activity level are all considered.  And the differences are significant!  For me, a 36 year old woman, 150 pounds 5’9″ tall, my caloric needs for the day range from 1750 on a sedentary day to 2450 on a very active day.  That’s a 700 calorie swing.  

This is having some real effects on high school kids whose schools have already adopted the new guidelines.  Students who lead active lives – farm kids with morning chores, football players with before and after school practice – have a much higher need for calories than their sedentary peers, yet they are treated the same under the guidelines.  And the result is predictable:  hungry kids are going to eat.  Instead of making up those needed calories with an extra helping of school-prepared food, they binge on convenience snacks that they cart along with them.  Instead of an extra sandwich they’re grabbing a Snickers.

And these complaints aren’t just speculation by some blogger who hasn’t eaten a school lunch in a years.  There are some very real students making very legitimate complaints.  Unsurprisingly, some have taken to social networking sites to voice their disfavor and as this Youtube video shows, they are getting some attention.

Supporters of the reforms argue that not all students are athletes, and the average student doesn’t need more than 850 calories at lunch.  While that’s debatable (gym class, anyone?  And I know I burned more calories at some marching band practices than I do running now), don’t we want a school environment that fits the needs of more than just the average?

So what’s the right answer?  As with so many other things, education is probably a good start.  We let high school kids get behind the wheel of a car – armed with the right information about nutrition, I think they’re qualified to decide whether they’re hungry for an extra breadstick at lunch.

More reading:

What’s for school lunch?  Innovative blog featuring school lunches from around the world.

Fed Up With Lunch (the blog)  The pioneering project of a once-anonymous school lunch worker documenting the deficiencies in school lunches.

Fed Up With Lunch (the book) The book by the above blogger.  Well worth the read – I learned much.

Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution Jamie Oliver’s quest to change what’s wrong with school lunches is inspiring, disheartening, and utterly educational.  This should be required reading/viewing for everyone.