Earlier this week, I wrote a guest post in The Slow Cook and the Better DC School Food blogs about sugar in schools. In this article, I barely scraped the surface of this issue. Sugars are not just “empty calories”, sugar is a major anti-nutrient that can wreck havoc with your health.

The confusion over sugar continues. After all, fruit contains sugar, and what about beets and carrots?  My teacher and mentor Joan Gussow  once famously said  “I prefer butter to margarine because I trust cows more than chemists.”  I too, trust Mother Nature more than food companies. Carrots, beets and fruit are fine. In fact, they are really good for you!

Nowadays, many people understand that high fructose corn syrup (HFCS) is bad news. The beverage industry is responding by putting “cane sugar” into their drinks. Jones Soda boasts of having “pure cane sugar” in their soda, Pepsi is now boasting of “real sugar” in their Throwback brands that are being blasted all over Facebook and Twitter.  Vitamin Water with “crystalline fructose” is now showing up as a healthier alternative in school cafeterias (its not!).

Somehow consumers didn’t get the big picture message: refined sugar is bad for you! That refined sugar could have aliases like HFCS or cane sugar or crystalline fructose (found in Coca Cola’s Vitamin Water). All of this stuff will rot your teeth, expand your waistline, raise your cholesterol, the list goes on and on.

The World Health Organization defines free sugars as all monosaccharides and disaccharides added to foods by the manufacturer, cook or consumer, plus sugars naturally present in honey, syrups and fruit juices.

One other point worth mentioning: fruit juice = sugar hit. A glass of 100% juice is NOT the same as eating a piece of fruit! As a matter of fact, your morning glass of OJ can be contributing to your high cholesterol. Parents who think they are doing their kids a favor by giving them Minute Maid Lemonade or  Snapple 100% juice for an afterschool snack are damaging their kid’s livers, making them even more hungry, and of course, helping to make their dentists rich.

Apparently, fructose makes it so you don’t feel full. Makes complete sense that food manufacturers would want to use HFCS in their products. If you don’t feel full, you’ll keep eating and drinking. Great for a food company’s shareholders, not so great for your health.

NYC Mayor Bloomberg and the Center for Science in the Public Interest have declared war on salt. They claim salt is a major factor in heart disease and stroke.  Perhaps they should take a good long look at sugar! They’ll find a connection to diabetes, cancer, heart disease, and much much more.

Bottom line:

Eat Real Food. Drink Water.

She is fed up with school food and is taking it personally. Very personally.  An unidentified teacher somewhere in the mid-west has started a horrifying stunt. She will be eating (and photographing) her school’s lunch every day this year.  I greatly admire her bravery to put her health on the line to make a point.  School lunch in the USA is in need of a huge overhaul.

Thanks to the large number of concerned parents and health professionals here in the blogosphere, I expect that her  journey, which is reminiscent of  Morgan Spurlock’s Supersize Me film, will grow a huge following. The timing couldn’t be better.  The nation is starting to focus on the state of school lunch as  Congress is expected to update child nutrition programs this spring.  The re-authorization of the Child Nutrition Act will impact the health of 31 million children.

This  school lunch conversation needs to go beyond calorie counts and fat grams. We all know that a picture is worth a thousand words, the photos being uploaded daily to the Fed Up: School Lunch Project blog tell a lot. Viewing today’s posted lunch of a “bagel dog” along with some pale anemic looking tater tots made my stomach queasy and makes me wonder more about the health and well being of  kids who are eating this every day.

Our kids deserve real food in schools, not packaged processed chemicalized fare. We need to teach them more than just the USDA food pyramid by incorporating school gardens and food based education through out the curriculum. This is a most worthwhile investment in their future. Real food is preventative healthcare which will save all of us enormous amounts of money in the future.

What can you do to make some waves like this teacher?

Have kids and parents write letters: Slow Food’s Time for Lunch campaign offers some great tools that will help you to get this message across.  Letter writing can have a big impact that legislators can’t ignore.  Legislators who already understand the importance of better school food can refer to letters as evidence of support.

Visit your kids cafeteria and have some lunch. Better School Food has an action plan and a handy checklist that you can bring to the school cafeteria. Bring your camera to lunch and send the photos to your legislator. After all, a picture is worth a thousand words.