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Teen nutrition in America has changed drastically since 1946. Some of the things that have caused this change are the initiation of a school lunch program, sedentary lifestyles, and changes in the type of food that people eat. This has resulted in obesity, type II diabetes at an earlier age, and eating disorders. The nation’s school lunch program was issued in 1946. It opened in order for schools to “improve the nutritional health of the nation’s children” (American Kids: Diet of Danger). It is said that the lunch program feeds about 27 million kids and over 94,000 schools every year. Right after the lunch program started, people were eating healthier, but this didn’t last long. After about two years, the lunch program began to decline in how healthy it was. Nowadays, schools serve salty snacks and fatty foods. One of the reasons that schools serve these kinds of food is because “schools get high fat foods for free or little amounts of money, but for the less fat foods, they have to pay large amounts of money.” “On the average of the school lunches everyday, about 40% of the food is fat” (American Kids: Diet of Danger). Teens really don’t eat fruits and veggies at all “except perhaps the iceberg lettuce sandwiched between the slice of tomato and the pickle decorating the hamburger they purchased at the local fast-food restaurant” (Krebs-Smith, 81-86). In 1960, President Kennedy proposed that all schools in the United States were to exercise everyday. In Kennedy’s speech he stated, “…All of you as individuals and as groups will participate in strengthening the physical well-being of boys and girls…” Before he gave his speech, people had been eating on a ‘meat and potato’ diet. They ate fries, burgers, and shakes and didn’t care anything about it. President Kennedy saw this and also the fact that children were not exercising as much as they needed to. After a while the exercising too became a low priority. Although people might think of it as a low priority, it most definitely isn’t. The more you exercise, the more calories you burn. Also, exercising daily can reduce the chances of blood clots and heart diseases (American Kids: Diet of Danger). Today, the nutrition of teens has also been affected because the school PE requirements have changed.
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