Editor’s Note:  This piece was written by guest contributor Kathryn Strong, M.S., R.D. Strong is a staff nutritionist with Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine.

Most of us got a lot of Fs in school: fatty cheese pizza, frankfurters, French fries. Healthy options were few and far between. But you’re thinking times have changed, right? They haven’t.

The problems with today’s school lunches were even highlighted during ABC Family’s “The Secret Life of the American Teenager.” During a recent episode, our organization aired a commercial featuring Wyntergrace Williams, 14-year-old daughter of Montel. In the ad called “School Lunch Revolution” she tells viewers that school lunches have too much fat and cholesterol. And she’s right.

Most school lunch lines are packed with hot dogs, pepperoni pizza, and beef burritos. These high-fat, high-cholesterol foods are unfair to students and are contributing to skyrocketing obesity and diabetes rates.

The nationwide consequences of the childhood obesity epidemic are grim:

• At least 30 percent of children in 30 states are already overweight or obese, according to a new report from the Trust for America’s Health and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation;
• one in three young people born in 2000 will develop diabetes at some point in his or her life, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found; and
• research has shown that the artery walls of overweight children resemble those of an average 45-year-old, according to a study presented at the American Heart Association’s 2008 convention.

The toll on the nation’s health is obvious. But there is also a monetary cost. Annual obesity-related health care spending now reaches $147 billion, double what it was about a decade ago.

Obviously, there is a desperate need to improve school lunches. As a dietitian who works with school food service providers, I know that helping schools and other nutrition programs provide more fruits, vegetables, and other plant-based foods could put a huge dent in obesity rates and the chronic diseases associated with obesity.

But schools will only be successful with the help of the federal government. The Child Nutrition Act, which helps determine what foods are served in the National School Lunch Program, is up for reauthorization in Congress this fall, and it could help schools serve more healthful vegetarian meals.

My office is on the Washington, D.C.-Maryland border, where schools have just started. On one side is an example of school lunch system that has found a way to encourage healthy eating behaviors among its students. The federal government is on the other side.

In Maryland, Kathleen Lazor, M.A., R.D., food and nutrition services director of Montgomery County Public Schools, has found a way to offer vegetarian and vegan options on a daily basis. Students get plenty of fresh fruits and vegetables and other creative, low-fat, plant-based foods like vegetarian chik ‘n nuggets and soymilk.

Simple lunch line additions like these that do students a world of good. Take a veggie burger, for example. It provides exactly the same amount of protein as a typical cheeseburger–15 grams. But while a cheeseburger harbors 10 grams of fat, a veggie burger has only 5, and it has no saturated fat, no cholesterol, and fewer calories.

Unfortunately, most schools struggle to serve food that meets government requirements for fat. According to a 2007 U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) study, meals served at 80 percent of schools are too high in total fat and saturated fat. As food prices rise, many schools rely on inexpensive commodities–many of which are high in fat and cholesterol–and may not be able to expand their menus in healthier directions.

It’s Congress–in the nation’s capital, just a few miles away from Montgomery County–that continues to allow the USDA to funnel more high-fat meat and cheese into nutrition programs, like the National School Lunch Program, to appease agribusiness lobbyists.

In fact, Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack recently announced the USDA will purchase an additional 75 million pounds of cheese, on top of the hundreds of thousands of metric tons of cheese, butterfat and other unhealthy dairy products it already dumps in school lunches.

But the Child Nutrition Act could mandate a few small changes and shifts in these subsidies–from sausage to strawberries, from cheddar cheese to chickpeas–that would greatly improve both the physical and fiscal health of our nation.

To ask Congress to help schools add more low-fat vegetarian and vegan lunch options, sign PCRM’s petition.