Schools and Vending Machines

While watching the news, at least once a week you hear about childhood obesity. They talk about fattening food being served at schools around the country and whether or not they should have vending machines on school grounds. Some people would like to take all the vending machines out of public schools, this goes for vending machines consisting of food and machines consisting of soda and Gatorade-like drinks. They claim that students are eating too much of these type of foods which is causing them to be obese. This debate is ongoing in my own town and no one is making a move.

I agree with the following website that more and more children are obese and according to them it is proven that children between ages 12 and 19 went from 5% being obese in 1980 to 18.1% in 2008. Does this mean that vending machines are causing obesity to jump 13.1% for children between 12 and 19 years old? I don’t believe that vending machines in public school are the cause of obesity and I don’t believe they should be taken out of schools.

From experience vending machines are very convenient in high schools. After school I would be doing something and instead of going home because of time restraints, I would grab a snack and a drink out of a vending machine to hold me over until dinner when I got home. I'm not, and never was considered obese, and I ate from the same vending machines they would like to remove because it is “so called” causing children to be obese.

Are vending machines the underlying issue here? Or is the children and the parents? Maybe the parents are buying too much junk food at home, or maybe children aren’t making the right choices. Or maybe they aren’t getting enough exercise because maybe they are playing to many video games.

I previously said that I as well ate from the same vending machines because I needed a snack while I stayed after school; I was staying after school because I was playing sports. I would get my exercise by playing sports or riding my bike or maybe even running for exercise. Maybe that’s what is causing obesity, kids aren’t getting enough exercise.

Parents are too busy to drive their kids to sports or extracurricular activities so they go home and play video games and don’t do anything until dinner time. So the easiest thing for parent to do is blame someone else…the school, the vending machines, whatever it may be, it definitely is not the parents fault…and unfortunately too many people play along.