This seems reasonable.
I remember seeing 'Supersize me' where kids were fed with junk food (e.g. pizza, chocolate bars, sodas) at school. Is that representative of American schools or did they pick the worst ones to make their point?
I think they maybe had deserts like pudding sometimes. There were no sodas or junk food available at all. The drink choices were 2% milk, chocolate milk, or water.
What I do remember is the food seemed fairly low quality. Canned and frozen packaged stuff, never anything resembling fresh. Every kid got the exact same meal unless you had some medical exemption.
In high school there were some bad choices available in the menu. There were soda and junk food vending machines, but they weren't part of the normal cafeteria and I never had money for them. While there were unhealthy options, there were also many healthy options and you simply bought what you wanted. The freshness was maybe a step up from elementary school.
I think there may have been efforts to remove the vending machines since my time there.
I read a bunch of years ago in Branded by Alissa Quart of American schools where soda giants would fund equipment for the sports teams and provide free soda for the cafeteria. So the school would both have to pay for their own drinks in the cafeteria and refuse sponsorship of the sports team to avoid being involved with soda the companies. It just makes economic sense in that case to let the soda company rope the kids in.
It's been a while since I read it, and I can't verify the truth. For me, it sounds like schools should have no part in getting kids addicted to soda.
I think at my school it was because staff wanted them, so why not have them available for the kids too? I don't think much thought was given to it, and even if there were it would have been framed as a matter of personal responsibility. Adults there would have not thought of their responsibility to teach children good eating habits -- that was for the parents.
I think the corporate sponsorship you talk about here also means that the pressure to fund schools properly through taxes are taken away. It gets too easy to avoid taxes by getting others to pay.
I had a great High School class in genetics that would not have been possible without large donations of money and equipment from a local biotech company.
I have fewer problems with companies donating science equipment, computers, and the like. There have been occasional issues with corporate donated history books though...
School lunches have certainly declined over the years. Continued relaxation of nutrition standards[1] doesn't help.
[0]https://www.usd497.org/cms/lib/KS01906981/Centricity/Domain/...
[1]https://www.usda.gov/sites/default/files/documents/secretary...
EDIT: Okay, since I'm not on mobile now, relevant link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_Size_Me#Counter-claims
I personally have lost 55 lbs since January 25th of this year and McDonalds hamburgers and fudge sundaes have been a meal frequently.
To prove a point a few years back, I ate nothing but pizza and diet Pepsi for several weeks and lost weight. 2 supermarket pizzas was something like 1800 calories.
What point did this prove? Weight is hardly the sole determinant of health.
It's true weight is very often a negative health indicator because of the toxic nature of the diet that results in weight gain. However, losing weight is not always a sign of being more healthy.
Shutting down your liver, clogging your arteries, and generally filling your soft tissue and fat storage with toxins is not healthy even if you appear to be losing weight.
(Though one imagines that if one is not willing to change one's diet or exercise habits to lose weight, the odds of them willing to do it to lower blood pressure or other such indicators seems low too.)
Let's clear one thing up first: aside from a few issues like joint stress, it's not weight in general that's the problem; it's body fat. If you're a power athlete with significant muscle mass, you're going to be able to carry a lot of weight and still be perfectly healthy as long as it's lean weight. Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson shouldn't worry about his weight, despite having a BMI that's technically in the obese category. If you have a high weight for your height and you don't look like a professional wrestler, you should definitely be concerned about your weight.
Aside from the problems caused directly by excess body fat, carrying around excess body fat also makes it far more difficult and far riskier to exercise, which means all your other health indicators are going to go down south. Even mental health is pretty strongly influenced by exercise. Also, excess body fat is a far more difficult problem to solve.
I would say this is putting the cart before the horse. It's not excess body fat that is the source of health problems. It's the lifestyle (diet and movement) that leads to excess body fat (as one of the many symptoms of growing health problems) from choices.
In other words, baldness, obesity, sluggishness, headaches, etc... are not the source of health problems - they are the symptoms.
Phentermine made it a lot easier because I didn't feel hungry, even when I was. But other than that, the same techniques applied: I used a calorie counter and tried to stick to the recommendation that it gave.
After using it a month or 2, I realized that its numbers were slightly high for me, and cut my max allowed calories a little further and started losing weight.
If you're wondering what your number is, the easiest way is probably just to follow what some tool tells you (I used Weight Watchers, then SparkPeople) and adjust the calories according to whether you are losing weight or not.
One caution: There is a rather large gap where you go from gaining weight to maintaining weight to losing weight. The area where you maintain weight is pretty broad. Finding that area is the first step, then slowly removing some calories until you start losing is the key, IMO. If you go too fast, you might remove too many calories and actually make it harder to lose weight than it should be. Your body will try to compensate for lack of calories.
http://www.thetraveltester.com/wp-content/uploads/mos-burger...
When you meet foreign travelers, ask them what they think about US serving sizes. Many of them find it shocking.
1) Eat on regular intervals. Don't starve yourself, but don't overeat. Typically you stop while you are a tiny bit hungry. The body is a bit slow on registering that you've had enough.
2) Cut out all sugary stuff, chocolate, ice cream, candy.
If you live in the US, it might be harder. My experience from living in the US was that it was hard to stay healthy there because 1) Almost all food contains some sugar 2) Served portions are usually way too large. And you buy things in too large quantities.
This means you might have to focus on cooking food from scratch at home to avoid the added sugar, and getting too large portions.
Don't cook larger portions to have left overs for later. You'll just eat more.
But if you are like me and can't be bothered to make food yourself, then buy EXPENSIVE food. This sounds silly but the thing is that when you buy cheap food, it doesn't taste well unless it is unhealthy.
Healthy food that tastes good is often expensive food. If you go to nice restaurants you tend to get smaller and healthier portions.
I waste a lot of money on food this way but it is just a trade off I've made. I rather waste money than get more unhealthy.
Pizza wasn't uncommon but it wasn't like take-out pizza, it was a real cheap basic version that had much less grease and fat. They would on rare occasions make 'real' pizza or have some kind of 'real' food that people would devour, but in general the lunch food was a grade or two lower in quality than the cheapest shit you can buy at walmart. In many schools it is literally the same food/supplier as our prison food so all of it was somewhat questionable in nutrient content.
Also the school breakfast programs were catastrophic, in my opinion. Again, no real food, just packaged donuts and danishes and sugar-laden cereals. It was arguably better when we had snack time instead, with milk and a bag of pretzels or Goldfish and a piece of fruit.
None of these are healthy staples!
Healthy staples are beans and whole grains.
Compared to sugar-laced and processed frozen foods that replaced them, anything home-cooked would be wildly more healthy.
I did forget to mention the mountains of C-ration style canned vegetables and fruits that were also present.
Pizza has a normal lunch. But chocolate bars, no.
In the US, we don't like to fully fund education with tax money, which means our public schools need other sources of revenue to fill the gap. Junk food vending is a large and crucial funding source.