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	growing child child health

Thirst For Profit - What Can You Do?
Issue 129, March - April 2005

While coke and pepsi rake in the bucks with school vending machines, our children pay the price—with their health.

Harold Goldstein, executive director of the California Center for Public Health Advocacy, says advocates need parents and teachers to help ensure that nutrition policies are first passed, then implemented. “The power that parents have at both the local school district level and at the state level to demand changes in the nutrition environment of their children’s schools cannot be underestimated.” He recommends that parents go to school board meetings armed with bags full of junk-food products that their kids have bought at school. “This will go a long way to shining a light on the public health disaster that is happening in our schools every day,” he said.

John Weidman, senior associate with the Food Trust and a leader of the Philadelphia Coalition for Healthy Children, recommends a four-step process:

1. Find out what’s happening in your school. What beverages are currently offered to students? What contracts are currently in place or being considered?
2. Gather data about the links between obesity and soda consumption. You’ll need solid facts to counter the arguments of the soda industry.
3. Build a coalition, even if it’s just a few parents, and try to get health nonprofits and hospitals on board. The more people you can bring in, the better.
4. Meet with the school district and contact the media and your elected officials.

   At the state level, parents can call and write legislators to demand that their schools provide only healthy options. Goldstein is hopeful about the “growing national movement to get unhealthy foods and beverages out of schools. Parents have great power—and exercising that power is how things are going to change.”