Flunking lunch: under pressure for money, many schools are offering students unhealthy alternatives to the school-lunch program.

• Author: Becker, Elizabeth

A school lunch often looks like an exercise in fat loading, with a supersize soft drink from a vending machine, followed by a candy bar from another machine. It is more in keeping with a meal from a fast-food outlet than what federal guidelines regard as nutritious.

This yawning discrepancy--between what students should eat, and what most actually pile onto their trays--has become a central issue in the national debate over what to do about the growing number of overweight young Americans.

For the first time in five years, Congress will take up the school-lunch issue, writing legislation that will affect the diet of 27 million public-school students.

School nutrition programs, including breakfast, lunch, and after-school snacks at school, make up most of the daily food intake for millions of children. The U.S. Department of Agriculture spends $10 billion a year on the programs.

A QUESTION OF MONEY

But school-lunch programs are ultimately overseen by local officials, who usually require the programs to act like businesses and cover their costs or even make a profit. To that end, cafeterias also serve a la carte foods that, though higher in fat, sugar, and calories, are what students prefer.

With so much choice, only half of students choose the more-nutritious federally subsidized meals--and then many do not eat everything, leaving the vegetables.

In most schools across the country, the cafeteria managers, principals, and athletic coaches also undermine the relatively healthful meals because they need to raise money. They load up vending machines, from which they receive part of the profits, with high-fat, high-calorie, high-sugar candy, cookies, chips, and ice cream. The school districts also sell vending-machine rights to soft drink companies.

WOULD YOU LIKE FRIES WITH THAT?

During a lunch hour at Albert Einstein High School in Montgomery County, Maryland, not long ago, students bought 440 servings of french fries--the most popular item by far. Another 360 students bought the fully prepared lunch. The cafeteria also sold 187 snack cakes, 118 slices of pizza, and 56 bags of potato chips. At the bottom of the list were three bowls of soup and three fresh salads.

With an epidemic of obesity among the young--the proportion of overweight children is now 15 percent--experts say changes in school lunches offer the best chance of weaning youths from the sugar and fat that is ruining their health.

"It is ironic that the school food program began because many young recruits in World War II were malnourished and physically incapable of meeting the demands of military life," says Rep. Marcy Kaptur (D-Ohio), the ranking minority member of a House subcommittee that oversees the Agriculture Department's spending. Today the problem is overweight schoolchildren who, Kaptur says, "are given more choices perhaps with less guidance than ever before."

In a report on obesity in 2001, Dr. David Satcher, who was then the Surgeon General, pinpointed school meals as one of the eight major areas where Americans should begin to battle fat. The report also discussed another culprit--the disappearance of daily exercise from school programs.

School officials have been cutting physical-education classes and recesses to make time for academic courses. As a result, high-school students taking daily physical-education classes dropped from 46 percent in 1991 to 29 percent in 1999.

Eric Bost, undersecretary of agriculture for food and nutrition, says exercise is often the forgotten part of a health program. "For me," he says, "the solution is threefold: Increase...