In the name of saving money on government-subsidized health care, state lawmakers are making your weight their business. They’ve introduced four bills this session directed at North Carolinians’ waistlines.
One bill, if passed, would re-establish the Legislative Task Force on Childhood Obesity, which last year recommended banning whole fat milk and juice in public and private day care centers. Another bill, ratified June 9, created a Diabetes Task Force charged with recommending strategies for reducing diabetes and associated health care costs. The Sodium Resolution, adopted in May, states that the House of Representatives “supports measures aimed at decreasing heart disease and stroke in North Carolina and encourages the State’s citizens to reduce sodium in their diets.
And House Bill 503, Nutrition Standards/All Foods Sold at School, aims to push children into the “healthier” national school lunch and school breakfast programs by reducing access to “competitive” foods. The bill has passed the House, but not the Senate.
A host of Democratic and Republican lawmakers agree that government should maintain an active role in controlling kids’ diets as long as government takes a major role in financing health care. Lawmakers said the best place to start fighting the obesity epidemic was with children, by feeding, educating, weighing, and measuring them in schools.
Parental rights advocates counter that what a child eats and what a child weighs is the parents’ business, not the government’s.
School nutrition
H.B. 503 imposes new nutrition standards on “competitive foods” sold in schools. Competitive food is defined as any food or beverage sold to students on school grounds that is not part of the federal school breakfast or school lunch program. That includes food sold in vending machines, school stores, snack bars, fundraisers (including bake sales), and other informal food sales to students on the school campus.
The bill would subject competitive foods to nutrition standards established by either the federal government’s Institute of Medicine or the Alliance for a Healthier Generation, a nonprofit founded by the American Heart Association and the William J. Clinton Foundation. The guidelines set out by both groups focus on promoting the consumption of fruits, vegetables, grains, and low-fat and fat-free dairy, along with reducing the consumption of fat, sugar, sodium, and calories.
Food in the national school lunch program is not required to meet these standards.
The Alliance for a Healthier Generation’s website has a link to “companies committed to providing healthier food” in schools. The companies include PepsiCo, whose Baked Cheetos, Cap’n Crunch Peanut Butter Crunch Cereal, and Quaker Breakfast Cookies meet the organization’s nutritional guidelines, and Kraft, whose Oreo Thin Crisps, Sugar Free Jell-O and Premium Saltine Crackers, also make the cut.
The Institute for Medicine states that “federally reimbursable school nutrition programs should be the main source of nutrition in schools,” and that “opportunities for competitive foods should be limited.”
When asked whether tackling childhood obesity was the proper role of government, bill sponsor Rep. Verla Insko, D-Orange, said:
“The children of today will be our future soldiers, law enforcement, and other public safety officers, and our future Medicaid and Medicare patients.”
Republican co-sponsor Rep. Stephen LaRoque, R-Lenoir, agreed: “As long as government’s going to subsidize health care, yes, it is.”
LaRoque said studies show limiting access to low-nutrient competitive foods lowers student’s body mass index.
“We’re also going to track them,” LaRoque said. “We’re going to take their BMI and track them per grade as they grow up, so we’ll be able to tell if what we’re doing has any effect.”
Task Force on Childhood Obesity
Sen. Larry Brown, R-Forsyth, sponsor of the bill to renew the task force on childhood obesity, spoke with Carolina Journal last year about why the government needed to dictate school and day care menus.
“Evidently, parents just don’t have the time or the desire to give them nutritious meals at home, and therefore, when they do get fed, we want them to be fed nutritious meals, and also to make them more active,” Brown said.
He went on to say parents are “not doing their job,” that by feeding them fast food, “they’re killing their children and not even realizing it.”
About last year’s proposal to ban whole milk and juice in private day care facilities, Brown said this:
“I don’t like to see the government step in and do anything to take away citizens’ rights to make their own mistakes – I don’t like that aspect of it – but at certain times if the parent is not going to do it, the government might ought to give a little oversight. If we’re going to pay the expense of it, we should have some role in dictating the nutritional value.”
Mother knows best
Michael Ramey, director of communications and research at ParentalRights.org, said no one is better equipped to make decisions about a child’s diet than the child’s parents.
“Parents know and love that child more than all the bureaucrats and lawmakers put together,” Ramey said. And parents also know the specific dietary needs of their children he said. Not all children are alike and not all parents agree on what types of food are the healthiest.
Parents should be allowed to choose whether they’ll participate in official school and day care nutrition programs, Raney said, without restricting competing nutrition programs. “That would allow the schools to take an active role in promoting health for those families who ask for their assistance, while leaving the ultimate decision over what a child eats with the fit parent, where it belongs.”
He admits that “unfit” parents do exist, but says they are the minority.
“To say the state should take charge in every case because some few parents will neglect their children ‘is repugnant to American tradition,’” Ramey added.
Sara Burrows is an associate editor of Carolina Journal.