Coke and Pepsi Get Detention

Under pressure from advocacy groups, school boards, and state legislatures, the three largest soft-drink companies announced last week that they would stop selling soft drinks and other sugary beverages in U.S. schools. The agreement, brought about by negotiations between the Alliance for a Healthier Generation and the beverage companies Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, and Cadbury Schweppes, will go into effect beginning next fall and will affect over 35 million children. Under the agreement, milk, juice, and bottled water will replace soft drinks, and their portion sizes will be capped. Many individual school districts and states have already taken steps to reduce the presence of soft drinks in schools, but this joint decision has a vastly larger reach. Although removing soft drinks from schools does not, by itself, fully address concerns about childhood obesity in the U.S., it is an important step towards encouraging healthy eating in children.

While soft drinks make up a small part of most children’s caloric intake, the calories they do contain provide little nutritional value and are less filling than calories consumed through food. As former President Bill Clinton, who helped to broker the agreement, noted, “If an 8-year old took in 45 less calories per day, by the time he reached high school, he would weigh 20 pounds less than he would have weighed otherwise.” Each shift made by the government, school districts, and corporations toward encouraging healthy eating is important, but without larger initiatives such as this one, necessary changes in the diets of American children will not occur.

While removing unhealthy beverages from schools is a worthy achievement, it does not address the need for education about healthy living habits in schools. The recent move by some cash-strapped school districts to reduce physical education classes and limit health education is misguided, as schools should instead increase the amount of time devoted to health education. If schools are short on funding to do so, the federal government should provide the necessary money to improve the quality of health education. The federal government should also improve the nutritional quality of school lunches, and, again, it should increase its subsidies in order to do so. While it is important for students to learn about healthy eating, there will be little effect if they continue to eat in a lunchroom that offers only marginally healthy food and vending machines stocked with unhealthy snacks. The removal of soft drinks from schools is but one step of many towards the goal of raising healthy children.

An unfortunate effect of this soft-drink ban will be to eliminate one source of funding for many schools, in particular for extracurricular activities. Serious funding shortfalls in numerous school districts in recent years have caused these schools to rely on exclusive contracts with beverage companies and vending machine revenues for supplementary funding. Hopefully, the revenue from juice and milk sales will help replace the lost money, but some school districts may still find themselves short on funds.

The recent agreement made by soft-drink companies to eliminate sugary beverages from schools is highly commendable. But schools’ banishing high fructose corn syrup is only a start, not a solution, to their imbuing healthy eating habits in their children.