Healthy Choices

If we think that it's best for kids to have options, and to teach them healthy choices, but then opt to leave sugared soft drinks in machines, what do we expect to happen over time?

Suppose we are successful in getting all students to make healthy choices. The result will, of course, be that no one will purchase sugared soft drinks because in class we are teaching that these are NOT healthy choices. Consequently, no one will purchase the drinks, and they will be taking up space in our machines. I'm assuming someone will then suggest that we remove them, and offer the healthy options that we want them to choose. In other words, the machines will be removed as an option. Would we (the Board) then want to argue that they continue to be included so that kids still have an option to make healthy or unhealthy choices? If they aren't there, there can't be a choice! Hmm....

Or, suppose that we are partially successful in getting some kids to make healthy choices. Presumably some kids will continue to make unhealthy choices. Who will these kids be? Will they be the healthy kids, or the unhealthy kids, who habitually choose unhealthy sugared drinks? Seems likely it will be the latter. If so, we won't impact the very kids that we truly want to impact. Unfortunately, I suspect that many of these students are the ones who do not have the best parental guidance and support on making healthy choices.

A related thought. In our proposed policy we seem to be saying that it will fall upon our teachers to educate our students about healthy and unhealthy choices. Is this a fair teacher expectation? How often would we expect them to share this information in order to be effective? Let's suppose that our teachers share the message daily. That would be 180 times during the school year our students heard the message? But consider that we know that kids are exposed to hundreds of messages weekly, and 1000's of messages over the school year promoting soft drinks (via TV and other advertising). Is it realistic for us to expect our message of healthy choices to be effective?

Significantly, we don't address the unhealthy choice of tobacco use by giving students the option of making an unhealthy choice. We seem to have been somewhat effective by removing the unhealthy choice as an option (together with other efforts). Why would schools want to offer unhealthy choices after spending time giving the message that we want our students to make healthy choices? It seems a bit contradictory.

With so many states and school districts removing soft drinks as an option it's pretty clear where we should be going. Eventually no school will be offering unhealthy sugared soft drinks to students. Even the beverage industry this week made recommendations on limiting sugared soft drinks to children. We have an opportunity in our new Wellness policy to be truly current with trends in a way that will be applauded by our community. No parents are going to complain that schools are not providing their children with soft drinks. Even our local newspaper has been complementing the district on the measures we are taking to improve student health.

I guess, if for some reason we want to gradually remove soft drinks from our machines it would make sense to go the way we discussed. But, unless my reasoning above is ignoring something important the "healthy choices" idea we discussed doesn't seem to make sense. Please give these ideas some thought.