Photo: The San Antonio Express-News, Tom Reel / AP Students have their lunch photographed in Texas elementary schools for research on childhood obesity.
Moms aren’t the only ones wondering what their kids are eating at school, and cameras in some elementary schools are tracking their choices.
The Social and Health Resource Center, based in San Antonio, Texas, received a $2 million dollar grant from the Department of Agriculture to see what’s going on in Texas elementary school cafeterias. With first lady Michelle Obama’s Let’s Move! campaign pushing schools to think about ways to deliver healthy meals to students, the Department of Agriculture wants to see how schools are faring.
The goal is to gather data that can be helpful in researching childhood obesity, diabetes and cardiovascular diseases.
Dr. Roger Echon with the Center said the cameras will be aimed at lunch trays and will work as an objective nutrition analysis tool, since gathering data on what kids 8-years-old and younger eat can be tricky.
“To date, the nutritional assessment is based on 182 food-related questions asked by a nutritionist about what they ate yesterday and all the way back to last week,” Echon said. This was something difficult to do with children who don’t have that kind of attention span, he said.
The research will capture bar codes on lunch trays and before-and-after images of students’ lunches to see what they eat. Only those students whose parents gave permission for them to be in the study will have pictures of their lunches taken. And the cameras are angled to get photos of just the lunch trays, and not the students, Echon said.
Although not for research sake, but more to keep mom and dad posted, some schools are providing parents with data on what their child chooses to eat for lunch when they’re not around.
Shelley Townsend, 27, of Brownsburg, Ind. said she can track what her son eats at school.
“My 7-year-old is able to choose what he wants to eat every day, and he did choose pizza for the first few months until we told him he was not allowed to eat that anymore,” Townsend said. “Given the choice of unhealthy items, kids will always pick the worst choices.”
John Jay Myers is the membership director of the Libertarian Party of Texas. He said dealing with childhood obesity is not the role of the government, especially the federal government.
“It’s hard to imagine this group getting a government grant for $2 million to study only five schools,” Myers said. “I can tell them why kids gain weight free of charge. They eat the wrong kind of food, or too much of any food, and they don’t exercise enough. Have the Department of Agriculture make the check out to John Jay Myers.”
But Townsend said she sees the unhealthy options schools offer, and would be open to having her son’s lunch photographed if it helped lead to kids getting healthier options.
“I think childhood obesity is a real problem,” she said. “I would wonder if they are also photographing packed lunches, which can often be very unhealthy too.”
Libertarians worry that manipulating factors, such as the use of cameras, can result in creating more problems than are solved, Myers said. It changes the natural environment and could create results you would not have otherwise seen, he said.
But Echon said the hope is to develop technology that is sensitive enough to measure with accuracy and confidence what a child of this age group eats.
