Everyone knows that the average american is overweight. From all the media you wouldn’t know, but it’s in the back of our minds. The fat jokes, the movies like “supersize me”, and even the people you see walking around. In america, there is the pressing factor of the media saying you have to be healthy, although american food makes that job of staying fit very hard for many to complete. We clearly have obesity problems, but the real problem is what teens eat.



In our teenage years we develop routines we keep for a lifetime. And at my school 95% of all students eat a snack directly after school at 3:00. Three O’clock? We just had lunch at 12:45 and a little over two hours later 95% of all the kids here are eating again. This “snack” usually consists of junk food from nima market a corner store up the street, or food from home. Is this reasonable? Could this be the cause for teen obesity?


Before I state my solution lets go though the average teen at our school and their appetite at our school I don’t know if the rest of the world is like us but here is our day; The average teen at our school gets up and 40% of teens will eat breakfast in the morning, then go to school. At school 26% of teens will bring a lunch. As you see the average kid must be quite hungry by 12:45 and many would say “this is good the less they eat, the skinnier they will stay”. I disagree because at 12:45 its lunch time and at the public school we go to we get the same amount of food as the kindergarteners. And due to the taste, most of it is thrown away.

The easiest way to make teens healthier is to give them more healthy and better tasting cafeteria food. If the food is good, the kids will eat it, if there is enough food the kids that eat it won’t snack on junk food after school and stay healthy. 74% of all middle school kids in our school eat school lunch so 74% of the teens that go to massachusetts public schools will suddenly be a lot healthier. If all the schools make the change it could be a dramatic unprecedented thing. In one not too expensive sweep teens life quality will improve and american health will increase.

Well the thing is it wasn’t entirely unprecedented because a large decrease in obesity has happened once before in the town of fitchburg. In 2009 49.2 % of all kids in fitchburg were overweight. It was declared a public health emergency and in 2011 childhood obesity rates dropped 40.9 % thats more than 500 kids that were overweight are no longer two years later. Now you are probably wondering how they did it, and this is it, all they did was serve a healthy breakfast, lunch after school snack and supper for the kids. This shows that the expert Mayor Lisa Wong on child obesity’s plan works and this plan is the solution.

The Cambridge Public School’s website has a section on the food services. Here is a direct quote. “Our staff works hard to provide healthy and tasty choices in our school meals. We do taste tests in the elementary schools when we introduce a new dish...” There is our problem, when we are elementary kids we may like anything but when you kids grow up tastes change and the amount of food consumed changes as well. Studies show that americans throw away half the food they are served or they buy. Thats $165 billion dollars of food and from what I have seen more than half is thrown away at the cafeteria. This is a different problem that bad tasting cafeteria food Middle school kids need a different menu with more healthy food.

I hope you have taken some wisdom out of this and put some thought into the topic. Be part of the solution and not the problem bring lunch to school, only take what you will eat, or even Convince others to help, our overall goal; being to Turn large bellies to large solutions



http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/08/21/food-waste-americans-throw-away-food-study_n_1819340.html
http://www3.cpsd.us/department/food/about_food_services

http://www.wbur.org/2013/01/02/fitchburg-obesity-initiative?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+wbur_news%2Fboston+%28News%3A+Boston%29

http://www.troubledteen101.com/articles42.html