Greasy pizza, chilidogs, cheeseburgers, sour cream-filled tacos and fried chicken nuggets.

Such high-fat, high-calorie staples fill children’s trays in local public school cafeterias every week.

Despite rigid nutrition standards set by the federal government, every school system in the region falls short.

Some lunches served locally contain too much fat, salt and calories, while others don’t include enough fiber or vitamins, according to the most recent state assessments.

Those unhealthy school meals contribute to childhood obesity and weight-related disease.

School officials are in a Catch-22. They could serve healthier food, but kids wouldn’t eat it.

Nutritionists argue that offering grease-laden food and justifying it with that argument endangers children and misses what should be the school’s goal – serving healthy food.

“I’m not surprised,” said Alice Sulkowski, a registered dietician with Mountain States Health Alliance. “When they rationalize sausage pizza as a breakfast (item) just because it has sausage, you know there’s something very wrong with this picture.”

It’s a problem school nutrition directors say they fight on a daily basis with no solution in sight.

HOW CAFETERIAS STACK UP
Eleven school systems in Southwest Virginia and two in Northeast Tennessee failed to meet federal requirements for the percentage of calories from fat and saturated fat, according to each state’s most recent School Meals Initiative for Healthy Children reports.

The in-depth nutrient check involves analyzing one random week of lunches for one school in each school system.

Schools must meet the recommendations of the Dietary Guidelines for Americans, which require that no more than 30 percent of calories come from fat and less than 10 percent from saturated fat.

Regional school systems had too much fat on their menus, and each received instructions to lower that percentage.

Besides failing to meet fat standards, every area school system’s lunches missed the calorie target mandated by the government. The calorie amounts required for school lunches equal one-third of the nutrients a child should receive each day.

Some schools, such as the one evaluated in Russell County, exceeded the calorie target by as many as 352 calories, or more than 50 percent, during a week. Other schools just missed the cutoff, like Sullivan County in Tennessee, which missed its mark by 22 calories.

Other problems were cited. For instance, Bristol Virginia and Tazewell County schools were told they needed to increase the amount of vitamin C, according to the reports., and Sullivan County and Bristol Tennessee schools were advised to decrease the amount of salt.

Recommendations were made to Washington, Dickenson, Wythe and Wise counties to increase the fiber in their menu options.

Too much salt can lead to high blood pressure, and too little fiber can affect digestion.

Despite the failures, many school systems, including those in Wise, Wythe, Washington, Dickenson and Russell counties and Bristol Tennessee, met the requirements for protein, iron, calcium and vitamins A and C.

PANDERING TO STUDENTS’ PALATES POSES HEALTH RISKS It’s nearly impossible not to exceed the fat requirements on a daily and often weekly basis, school nutrition directors said.

They point to students’ food choices as one of the main reasons meals don’t meet all of the federal nutrition guidelines. Students typically won’t eat healthier entrees, which means fewer students buy cafeteria lunches.

If that happens, the school system’s nutrition budget, often not subsidized and run independently of the main budget, takes a hit. Student participation comprises a critical part of the income in those budgets.

For that reason, school nutrition directors often include less-healthy entrees they know students will buy.

“You have to give the kids what they want,” said Kathy Hicks, director of nutrition for Bristol Virginia schools. “As much as you try, you can’t make high school students eat what they don’t want. You know that (offering pizza) is not really good, but you have to do it if you want to keep the lunch program running.”

A lunch that could make the grade nutritionally might include baked salmon, broccoli, asparagus, fresh fruit, bread and milk, but “kids aren’t going to touch it,” said Ron Fink, director of nutrition for Bristol Tennessee schools.

School nutrition directors constantly try to maintain a delicate balance in budgeting, menu planning and sticking to nutritional requirements, he said.

Despite those arguments, some don’t accept financial pressure as reason to offer fatty choices in school lunches. School nutrition programs started as a way to ensure students received the foods they needed, said Sulkowski, the dietician.

“What’s the biggest problem facing our youth? It’s no longer whether they’re getting fed,” she said. “It’s whether they’re getting fed too much. At some point, the school system has got to decide that they will serve healthy food regardless of participation.”

She said she understands the money predicament but added that it’s not a valid excuse for serving unhealthy food. It hurts children in a myriad of ways from shortening life span to affecting classroom performance, she said.

In her 25-year career as a dietician, Sulkowski has watched schools continually fall behind in helping students make healthy choices. It’s a frustration for her that generating money becomes the force behind the content of cafeteria menus and that many school systems don’t have registered dieticians on the payroll.

“For every step forward, we’ve gone two steps back,” she said. “And the two steps back have been to generate more income by having pizza for breakfast, hamburgers and french fries in junior high and pop machines in the cafeterias.”

To compound the problem, some school directors have difficulty monitoring the nutritional content of every meal. Some school systems, like Bristol Tennessee’s, don’t have programs or the means to calculate the nutritional statistics of every meal.

“I don’t know of any school system in Upper East Tennessee that monitors the fat grams on a weekly basis,” Fink said.

Occasionally, he calculates nutritional statistics for meals, but monitoring and managing the nutritional elements for every meal would be a huge undertaking, he said.

Others, like school officials in Bristol Virginia, do have programs to monitor nutritional data. By plugging menus, recipes and ingredients into a computer program, Hicks can calculate the nutritional value of each meal and get information about fat, calorie and vitamin content.

TRYING TO GET HEALTHIER
Virginia and Tennessee require schools that don’t meet the nutritional guidelines to create and follow an improvement plan.

But that’s the only consequence for failing to meet standards.

Each state works with school divisions to ensure their improvement plans are reasonable and achievable, said Lynne Fellin, acting director of school nutrition for the Virginia Department of Education. The state also reviews school systems to ensure changes are made.

School nutrition directors said they have made significant improvements in the nutritional value of cafeteria food and that they will continue trying to meet nutritional guidelines.

Some cafeterias have substituted nonfat seasoning for butter and 1 percent milk for 2 percent. Many use premade foods, which prevents cafeteria workers from adjusting recipes and inadvertently increasing calorie and fat content. They serve cake but in smaller portions.
Other cafeterias have switched from white bread to whole wheat and bake items rather than frying them, when possible.

“The way that school meals are prepared today is totally different from 20 years ago,” said Hicks, the Bristol Virginia schools nutrition director.

But, in some cases, they’re still far from preparing low-fat and low-calorie lunches.

dcourrege@bristolnews.com | (276) 645-2549