TIDBITS FROM SANDRA

“The first step to solving a problem is to begin.” 

Childhood obesity is a problem in our nation and we in South Dakota cannot say “not here”.  Look around the students in your school.  What are you seeing?  What are we in food service doing to contribute to a solution?  Here are some suggestions:

• Make sure the meals you are serving are not excessive in fat, saturated fat, and calories. 

• Take steps to learn how to make that evaluation or find someone that can help you.

• Be sure that the extra items you sell meet reasonable nutrition standards. 

• Offer to provide nutrition information and nutrition education to the students, staff, and board members.

• Limit the amount of serving sizes to age-appropriate serving sizes that meet the menu-planning standards.  Unlimited seconds on high fat items do not fall into that strategy. 

• Provide the nutrient analysis of the meals you serve.  If that’s too overwhelming, provide the calories.  List the nutrients or calories, as appropriate, that a student should have in a day.

• Provide “nutrition tidbits” for the school newsletter.  If you don’t know the facts, you have resources at hand that would enable you to put something together.  It doesn’t have to be long and technical – short and sweet usually works best.

• Put up a bulletin board with nutrition education information on it that includes good food choices and physical activity.

Classes are coming together for the fall conference.  There’s a wide variety and a number of new classes.  Look for an article on the conference elsewhere in the newsletter and watch for a mailing in April announcing the conference.

In closing, a couple of giggles:  “On April Fool’s Day, a mother put a fire cracker under the pancakes. She blew her stack.”

“Overweight is something that just sort of snacks up on you.”

Have a great day!

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