Nutrition 101 starts in the cafeteria

The fact that 90 percent of the day’s spinach was thrown away by Iola High School students at a recent lunch is not a reason to stop serving the vegetable.
In fact, it may be the very reason even more fruits and vegetables need to be served in school lunch lines. Seems students need to be taught certain foods do the body more good than others. And a learning environment such as school is the perfect place all kids can enroll in Nutrition 101 — otherwise called lunch hour.
The waste of good food frustrates Colleen Riebel, food service director for the local school district.
“If your kids say they’re hungry, they probably are,” she told school board members Monday night.
The answer, however, is not to serve the students a high-calorie diet heavy in starches, fats and sweets. Sure we’d like to eat pizza and hamburgers every day — unfortunately, our brains are wired that way — but it’s not what we need to develop strong bodies and keen minds.
Riebel said the school’s mid-morning snack bar is a big success to help get students through the morning. The biggest sellers? Pop Tarts and banana nut bread. In other words, desserts.

THE AVERAGE teenage girl needs about 2,000 calories a day. That’s if she’s 5-foot, 5 inches, weighs 130 pounds and has an active lifestyle. Her male counterpart, at 5-foot-9 and 150 pounds, needs 2,900 calories.
The average school lunch contains 850 calories. So Susie probably shouldn’t eat the entire meal, while Brian is safe to clean his plate. Typical lunches include a protein, say a grilled chicken patty, a cup of vegetables, a half-cup of starch such as sweet potato fries, a whole grain roll and eight ounces of fat-free milk.
The same amount of calories can be had at McDonalds with a Big Mac, small fries, two packets of ketchup, a diet Coke, and for dessert, a nonfat iced latte with sugar-free vanilla syrup. With the McDonalds menu the only redeeming food is the meat patty, otherwise its mostly “empty calories,” with no nutritional value.
Learning how to eat smart is an important life skill. It’ll help combat obesity and ward off heart disease, hypertension, and other debilitating symptoms. It used to be that only adults had to worry about such things, but that’s not the case these days. Childhood obesity is now of epidemic proportions in the United States.
People complain it’s too hard to cook healthy. It takes too long to chop up vegetables or to make them taste good.
At our house we trying to incorporate more vegetables into our evening meals. Most nights we have a salad of dark green lettuce and a cornucopia of vegetables scattered on top, in addition to hot vegetable. We eat meat and fish, but not every night. Sometimes nice beans or tofu provide the protein.
I’m a new fan of the magazine “Eating Well,” and followed its Thanksgiving Day menu, which included all the regular favorites — creamed corn, mashed potatoes, green beans, pie, cranberry sauce, turkey and stuffing — but per serving was half the calories of traditional recipes. Not one bite suffered from having fewer calories.
I’m sharing one of my favorite recipes new to our house. It’s low in fat, cholesterol, carbohydrates, but a good source of protein. What makes it so easy to make is that Walmart now carries precut butternut squash, so other than dicing an onion, it’s a matter of throwing all the ingredients together and letting it cook for 30 minutes. The cost per serving is under $2.
My fear is that Walmart will pull the pre-cut squash after the holidays. It comes packaged with small pouches of dried cherries, brown sugar and a stuffing mix. I toss the stuffing and save the cherries and brown sugar for an early morning’s bowl of oatmeal. Delicious!