After extensive hearings, and reviews of statistical surveys of students, Congress concluded that children learn better on a healthy diet. Not only is the child taught what a good diet consists of, but his parents and family likewise are indirectly instructed. For decades, the School Lunch Program has served this nation well. It has provided tens of billions of healthful meals to the nation's schoolchildren. Yet thousands of those schools have openly defied the intent of the Senate and House Agriculture Committees, and Congress as a whole, in providing those dollars, by encouraging school children to eat junk food.
Propaganda touting the consumption of junk food is now commonplace in the nation's schools.
About 12,000 schools show Primedia's Channel One, an in-school marketing program disguised as a news show, which features a parade of ads for junk food and soda pop to a contractually obligated captive audience of about eight million school children. This propaganda campaign for bad nutrition is intensifying. Soda pop is an example. It is probably no accident that childhood obesity has become a major public health problem in the United States. These young people will subject themselves and the whole society to enormous costs.