School Food Persuasive Essay

Words: 1531
Pages: 7

The largest hypocrisy in the modern American education system is the concept of the food pyramid. From a young age, children have the concept of what they should and should not eat, what is healthy and what isn’t perpetually drilled into their heads. Yet, when students arrive to their cafeteria expecting their lunches to be equally nutritious and delicious, they are instead presented with a bleak reality: meals that are prepackaged, injected with preservatives, and are as cold as the government’s heart. Worst of all, those meals do not coincide with the very rules that children are expected to follow. Therefore, the United States public school lunch system should be modified to better accommodate the needs of the children of America. One of …show more content…
It is a known fact that the United States has one of the highest rates of obesity in the world. Compared to only three decades ago, the rate at which American children are becoming overweight has doubled (Brown). This substantial rate is due in part to the lunches our nation’s children have been consuming. A study conducted by Diane Schanzenbach concluded that children “gain more weight after starting school” from consuming the lunches provided by the school, rather than bringing their own meal from home. Schanzenbach also deduced that the differences between the two groups of children, those who eat at school lunch and those who don’t, cannot “be explained by … background characteristics.” Additionally, lunches should also concentrate their focus on improving the health of the children as well. Continuing to consume unhealthy lunches on a daily basis can lead to both short term and long term detriments on their overall health. According to an article by The Center for Health and Health Care in Schools, children who are either overweight or obese are at greater risks of developing asthma, Type 2 diabetes, sleep apnea, and adverse levels of several cardiovascular diseases. If children are presented options on how to eat healthier options at a young age, they will carry on those good eating choices for the rest of their lives and deal with fewer health issues over their