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The Wasatch County School Board is to be commended for being the first district in the state to limit the amount of the junk food available to high school students in vending machines. Hopefully, other school districts in Utah will follow suit.
The district’s newly adopted nutrition policy requires that 70 percent of the contents in school vending machines be water, milk, 100 percent fruit juices and other nutritional items. Junk food – candy bars, chips and carbonated sodas – will get no more than 30 percent of vending machine space and will be priced higher than the nutritional goods.
Frankly, the 30-percent allotment for junk food is still too high. We suspect higher costs won’t be enough to discourage many students from buying the sweet stuff, but at least they’ll have better choices. And since the new policy requires each school to have a nutrition education program, an attempt will be made to teach students to make healthier choices.
They need to. Overeating leads to obesity. Among children it has become an epidemic. It not only breeds ill health, but poor academic achievement as well.
KSL encourages other school districts to follow the lead of Wasatch. For the sake of the long-term health and eating habits of Utah children, the message of eating healthier needs to be proclaimed with fervor.