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Obesity in childhood is among the most serious concerns in the U.S. and almost one-third of all children as well as adolescents have an overweight or obese body. Considering the issue of obesity in children, schools, especially the availability of junk foods in schools have gotten substantial attention as children spend a good amount of their time in schools (Datar & Nicosia, 2009). Food items such as candy, soda, and chips are also considered as competitive foods as they are available along with school meal programs and usually compete with them. Competitive food and beverages (CF&B) are available almost universally in schools (Sanchez-Vaznaugh, Sánchez, Crawford, & Egerter, 2015). Therefore, it seems important to work on CF&B in schools to manage obesity in children.
For the study on the management of childhood obesity, CF&B policies have been considered as an intervention. Those policies include the prohibition of the sale of sugary beverages requiring at least 50% of fruit juice without any added sweeteners. The policies also consider limiting the fat content within milk to 2%. Moreover, the rules about CF&B require the reduction of total calories from fats to 35%; the percentage of calories obtained from saturated fats to 10%, and reducing the sugar content in different snacks to 35% or even less than this percentage by weight. Those policies are applied to schools especially to students from kindergarten to eighth grade (Sanchez-Vaznaugh et al., 2015).
The study of this intervention is important as very few studies have published the impact of CF&B policies on health outcomes of children, even though these policies were established about 10 years ago (Sanchez-Vaznaugh et al., 2015). Moreover, comparison of these policies to controls could also help in developing more optimized policies.
References
Datar, A., & Nicosia, N. (2009). Junk Food in Schools and Childhood Obesity: Much Ado About Nothing? Santa Monica: RAND Corporation.
Sanchez-Vaznaugh, E. V., Sánchez, B. N., Crawford, P. B., & Egerter, S. (2015). Association between competitive food and beverage policies in elementary schools and childhood overweight/obesity trends: differences by neighborhood socioeconomic resources. JAMA pediatrics, 169(5), e150781-e150781.
