Only Diet Soda

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In a recent agreement of major beverage distributors, and anti-obseity advocates, non diet soda will no longer be sold in schools.

To me sounds like a crock. While I agree that obsesity is a growing probelm in America (no pun intended), I do not see how not selling non-diet sodas will help the problem. If you are concerned about your weight, all schools already have a button for a diet soda on the vending machines, and surely many high schools have nearby convenience stores where students can simply go purchase a regular soda before class.

The other problem is what if you aren't obese, and you want a regular soda? People who are obese in many cases have an issue of self-control when it comes to food. Most high schools don't let you eat during class, so it's not like students are eating all day. By restricting their soda consumption for a 30-minute period during lunch isn't going to have any measurable effect on a student's caloric intake. A 12-ounce can of soda has 150 calories (whereas diet sodas have 1 calorie or 0 calories). People who are obese are over-consuming by far more than 150 calories a day.

 

Schools !!!!!

They're selling soft drinks on the property of schools !!!!!

Damn !!!

I am inclined to never ever let that happen around here!

 

How about not selling soda on school property, period?

 

At my school, they're launching a new "healthy menu" thursday, and they're in the process of completl replacing cola with fruitopia, juice and water. Bloody hell!!! Fruitopia contains more sugar than a can of soda! WTF?!? They're COMPLETLY WITHDRAWING all soda. They seem to be on the verge of sending back the dispenser machines of soda back to Coca-Cola as well.

A salad bar, no more cola... a total ****ing nightmare.

 

I have two words for everyone: Personal Responsibility.

If you are obese, it's up to you to watch what you eat, unless of course you have a physical or psychological illness that is the cause of your obesity. If you have a thyroid problem and your metabolism works at a snail's pace, it's probably not your fault if you're obese. Likewise, one of my wife's co-workers has a psychological condition where she can't stop eating. She even takes food with her in the car for the ride in to work - she literally can't go more than 30 minutes without eating something. Again, it's probably not her fault that she's obese.

However, most people who are obese are that way because they make poor food choices and/or over-indulge. I was severely overweight (probably obese) for a long time. A healthy male who is 5'9" tall like me should weigh about 165 lbs. For a long time, I weighed more than 40 pounds in excess of that. I stopped eating at McDonalds, I switched to diet beverages, and instead of my snack shelves being stocked with Doritos, I now have a banana or an apple for a snack in the evening. I'm still not where I want to be weight wise, but I'm down to 175 lbs, meaning that now I'm just a little overweight instead of obese.

The point of all this is that a great many people who are obese do not have medical or psychological problems. Currently 28.7% of adult American men and 34.5% of adult American women are clinically obese. I can't possibly believe that over 1/4 of all men and over 1/3 of all women have these psychological or physical problems. In fact, I can't believe that even the majority of them have this as the cause. I think the problem that many of them have is that they lack the personal conviction necessary to make a change in their life. Granted, not everyone can afford to buy exercise equipment, or to purchase a gym membership, but everyone can decide to drive past that McDonalds on the way home from work.

Finally, I can understand why some people feel that no soda should be sold in school. Whether you're talking about regular or diet soda, there is nothing nutritious about drinking soda, and certainly there are healthier choices out there. If that was the thinking in this agreement, I could see some sense in it, but that's not what this agreement says. It is only banning non-diet soda from being sold in school. So in effect it's saying it's OK to drink a non-nutritious beverage, so long as one of the things that makes it non-nutritious isn't sugar.

When I went to school, we had a soda machine next to the lunch room. At any time during lunch you could go get a soda, and as long as you didn't take it out of the lunch room with you, there was no problem. I don't see why selling soda in schools marks the end of western civilization, and I don't see how restricting non-diet soda is going to end or even measurably reduce the frequency of obesity.

 

I'm obese.

I *will* continue drinking soda despite being seriously overweight.

I almost never bought soda from school though - I bought larger bottles from the nearest store.

And I'll get violent if someone starts being annoying about me getting diet sodas. They give me serious headaches. Comparing the health effects between artificial sweeteners and sugar, I pick sugar any day.

 

You don't actually think there's genuine sugar in soda, do you? Sugar is much, much too expensive.

 

I can add only one thing to AtFI's post and that is a question.

What are parents doing these days?

 

Well, I think there would be no problem to find a statistic that would show that there is a strong correlation between selling soda at school and a hightend occurence of obesity.

It's a problem of responsability. It's my personal responsibility that crap like selling soda doesn't happen at school! Why ? Because parents are give their children into the care of the school. Now how would parents act if their children (who are by defintion not mature before the finished school) would pick up bad habits in a place they are forced to send their children to ?

[ May 03, 2006, 19:45: Message edited by: Iago ]

 

Sorry - guess I didn't think that one through. I'd like to revise my previous statement: So in effect it's saying it's OK to drink a non-nutritious beverage, so long as one of the things that makes it non-nutritious isn't high fructose corn syrup (at least I think that's the sweatener most sodas use).

I disagree. I think it would be easy to find a study that showed there is a strong correlation between soda consumption and a heightened occurence of obesity, but I seriously doubt that it would be linked to whether or not the school had a soda machine. I don't think that there are many people out there who are obese because they drink a can of Coke with their lunch. As Nakia rightly points out, if their parents were being responsible, and were feeding them an otherwise healthy diet at home, they wouldn't be obese. The problem isn't the can of Coke they drink at lunch, it's the Big Mac and five more cans of soda they drink when they get home from school, and the Krispy Kreme Donut they eat for dessert.

 

Perhaps if real fruit juices were cheaper?

 

@ Aldeth

Personaly responsibility? Have you ever MET a kid?

I hear what you're saying, but we're dealing with young people who don't generally grasp the idea of long-term consequences very well. Most teenagers I know think they're 10-feet-tall, bulletproof, and invisible (at least the semi-active ones). They'll do whatever they want unless they have an extremely good reason otherwise, and most teenagers think you only get fat off of stuffing yourself with fries all day. The threat of "getting fat" doesn't usually mean much.

My anyway.
---------
It's kind of a "when the cat's away, the mice will play" kind of thing. When I was in middle and high school, some kids would eat Funions, Skittles and a Mountain Dew for lunch, pretty much every day. One reason they would cite is because it was CHEAPER than going through the lunch line. Another was, they preferred it over the meat loaf/green beans/rice krispie treat combo the lunch ladies were serving. Yet another was because their parents wouldn't let them eat that crap at home, so they do it at school. And other parents (the bad ones) raise their kids on a steady diet of soda, chips, candy bars and whatever other junk food they're mesmarized into nagging their parents to buy for them after seeing the dazzling Saturday-morning commercial for "New Frosted Extra-Crispy Cheetoes™! Now with Crack!™"

In high shool, my cafeteria had 2 lines: the pizza line (a slice of daily-delivered Dominoes, a small mountain of fries, and a carton of milk) and the OTHER line (meat loaf, chicken, peas, yada yada). I'm sure you can guess which line was the most popular, and almost exponentially so.

Most school boards hate the fact that they have to sell sugary crap in the vending machines. As educated people, most teachers realize like we do that a daily diet of sugary soda and pizza isn't good for anyone. The problem is those machines generate far too much money for the school districts, so it's extremely tough to get rid of them. Many school districts have tried to arrange to stock vending machines with healthier alternatives. But the companies that own and stock the machines have such pull that even get THAT much is like pulling teeth. They insist that a kid who wants a Snickers isn't going to be interested in an apple and, let's be honest, they're probably right despite their obvious self-interested bias.

If I sound a little wonky on the subject, it's because my company spent over a year trying to market protein shakes and a kid-friendly protein bar to 7 or 8 different school districts in Texas. 7 refused outright, and the one that was very interested got such a difficult time about it from the school board and the vending machine companies who theatened them that it didn't really go too far, despite how badly they wanted to be an example of a healthy school district. Other districts across the country have been successful, and it's getting better. But it's still pretty rare.

I don't really see this as a huge problem, personally. I think it's a step in the right direction. After all - kids aren't being PREVENTED from drinking non-diet sodas, they're just being denied a place to buy it on school grounds. If a kid wants a mountain dew THAT bad he can bring his own. At least the temptation is being removed for the other kids when the cost/benefit factor rolls in for them.

 

Exacly why should kids be subjected to high intensity packaged foods marketing at school of all places? And from the age of 5 onwards?

So the kid can "freely choose" Cheetos, Twinkies, and Coke every day eating with his/her friends? A choice between cafeteria food and brightly packaged junk food, what do you think a 6 year old will choose? The green beans?

I think the junk food companies *count* kids pressuring eachother to buy their products.

I don't think "personal choice" has anything to do with the issue of marketing junk food to kids at public schools.

 

(And DR too)

It didn't work that way when I was in elementary school. We had a snack line, but you were only allowed to purchase a single item. So, you could for example, get a single serving bag of chips for 25 cents, but you couldn't get chips, cheetos and a candy bar and call that lunch. There were no vending machines in any of my elementary schools either (and I've yet to see a school where they have them accessible to students - only in the teacher's lunch room) nor were there soda machines. It was only high school where you had access to such items, and by the time you're 14 you should be able to decide for yourself what you want to eat. And that was the entire premise I was working on. It's one thing in elementary school, another in high school.

 

Back up here a moment. Why on earth are soda drinks being sold at schools at all???

You could never buy fizzy drinks at school when I was a kid. You weren't even allowed to bring them to school at all.

I personally don't think fizzy drinks have any place in schools, diet or otherwise. Diet drinks are just as bad as the undiet ones.

 

If you are a lab rat getting injected with 10 times (to scale) the ammount of the sweetening agent that a human could possibly consume over the course of his entire life at one go..........

 

While I appreciate your sentiment, and do acknowledge that no soda is really "good for you," that statement is patently and demonstrably false.

 

Well at least you appreciate my sentiment.

 

That I do!

 

@DR;

Are you saying that diet soda is good for you? Or just not as bad as non-diet?