Hooray for Eric Goldstein, Chef Jorge, Katherine Grimm, Chancellor Joel Klein, and the entire New York City Department of Education..! They want to make schools safe and healthy for all students... (I chatted this up on a couple MSNBC shows today...Here's the "Way Too Early" show with Willie Geist and here's "Dr. Nancy" with Dr. Nancy Snyderman and Greg Lukianoff.)
The School Food program already offers lunches with whole grain breads and without transfats and ADHD-inducing artificial food coloring. Now, as part of the NYC School Wellness Policy, they're saying "Bye Bye Bake Sales..." (Okay, schools can still have them once a month. why why why??)
40% of NYC's students are overweight or obese... 40%..!
These kids can expect worsening obesity, type 2 diabetes, heart disease, orthopedic issues and fertility complications...
Think we should take this seriously? Thank goodness Mayor Bloomberg, the Dept. of Health, and the Dept. of Ed do.
Bake sales are an easy way to make money. True. (Actually, I can think of a lot of bad ways to make easy money...I bet you can too. Does that make it okay for the PTA..? Click Here for Dr. Joanna Dolgoff's list of non-face-stuffing moneymakers.) It's also true that the bake sale products compromise the health and well-being of kids, they contribute to obesity and diabetes, they create cravings and induce a false sense of hunger, and they habituate children to over-eating and consumption of non-nourishing, ingestible entertainment during the school day.
Hey, I'm all for enjoying a sweet treat now and then. And keeping those indulgences out of school allows them to be preserved for the weekends and special occasions. It should be a-okay for a kid to enjoy cake and ice cream at a Chuck-E-Cheese birthday party without worries of weight gain... But who keeps inviting Chuck-E-Cheese to school..?
During the school day, no kid should be confronted with constant junk food solicitations. Period.
And yeah, let's look to the intellect and ingenuity of today's students to conceive fundraising ideas that raise cash while causing no harm. In the era of the Internet, Walk-a-thons and Farmers Markets, I'm pretty confident today's kids will have loads of moneymaking ideas that don't involve stuffing their faces. We're only as limited as our imaginations...
And somehow because transfat, sugar, and enriched flour are agents of obesity and diabetes, which are conditions of habituation and progression, we ignore their seriousness at the peril of our own children's health.
If only baked goods caused lice...
**Big thank you to MSNBC's Willie Geist and Dr. Nancy Snyderman for having me appear today to chat up NYC's Bake Sale Ban on "Way Too Early" and "Dr. Nancy."**
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