The School Lunch Revolution: Nourishing Minds, One Meal at a Time

0:00Coming up on this episode of the Dr. Hyman Show. There was an incredible study by the CDC looking at nutrition in kids and found that those kids perform far better when they're well-nourished. If they're not, they're basically having poor academic performance. They're having more absenteeism. They're having more disruptive behavior. They're less likely to problem solve, less likely to pay attention. But I think this is something we just don't understand that we're doing to our kids. And it's something that's completely solvable with real food. it. Before we jump into, have you been feeling stressed or tired lately?

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1:37Just open Apple Podcasts and tap try free to start your seven-day free trial. The junk food and the processed food and the food is more expensive than real food cooked from scratch by real humans. locally in the kitchens. That's exactly right. And when we were going through this process, we brought in chefs to just help us understand it. And so Ken Oranger, who is a celebrity chef in Boston, pointed this out to us. He said, the pre-packaged roast beef that they're slicing up has been processed. So the whole bunch of people have touched it, manipulated it, and injected it with preservatives and salt and all kinds of other things.

2:17And sugar, lots of sugar. That's right. why do you put sugar in turkey i have no idea no well probably to hide whatever other things you're trying to hide because you cooked it so long ago um but the and so he said you know that costs way more than if we just order some roast beef and have it shipped to the schools and so as we started to do the analysis it was true in every case if you buy pre-packaged stuff because it's been processed there's so much more cost in it and then you've got margin on it as well so So there's profit on it. Wow. So you basically decided you were going to take this on and you created something called My Way Cafe.

2:54Yeah. And in the discovery of the challenges, you found a whole set of solutions, right? Because the basic mantra is, look, there's only a small amount of money that kids get for school lunch. What is it? $2 or something per lunch? Yeah. It's a little more than that. $3.45. cents. $3.45. But 20 cents of it is milk. Okay. Which by the way, we need to talk about this. Yeah. But skim, skim or flavored. Okay. Another topic. We'll get to it because I could go on for hours about that. But you hear the mantra, look, this is the best we can do. We can't serve kids delicious real whole food because it's too expensive.

3:36It's too difficult. It's not possible. and you actually figured out that not only possible, but it's not that hard and it's totally scalable. So tell us about that process. Yeah. Well, it was fun to do it on paper, right? So if you pull out spreadsheets and you start to put in all the food costs and all the labor costs and all the transportation costs, you can show very easily in a model that you can take the same subsidy from the USDA, employ three times as many people, serve all real whole food. And the only single time investment you need to make, we did it philanthropically and then the city has now taken it over, is to build these micro kitchens.

4:16They have a combination oven and they have the right number of sinks, they have prep tables and they have a freezer and fridge in them. So they're nothing out of this world, but it's exactly the amount of equipment. We have rice cookers as well for people to prepare a full buffet of hot and cold food every day for kids. looks like a rainbow. Kids love it. It smells good. It doesn't smell like heated plastic in schools anymore. It smells like real food. And so, but that process took a long time. That process took about nine months of us pushing really hard. And is that a cat? Yeah, it's my cat.

4:52That's so cute. I love it. He's my work companion. I don't have any other people to hang around with anymore. You have the cat. We have the cats too. Yeah. So we tripped over, it was like one thing at a time, every hurdle. And you can imagine why government alone can't do this because there are so many no's that get in the way. And so we just kind of, every time someone said no, we said, why not? And we would just solve the problem. And then we'd get to the next thing. One of the earliest problems we solved was everything was coming in wrapped. So apples were wrapped in plastic, oranges were wrapped in plastic it just made it just made it look so unappetizing and um so the why the answer to the why why do we have to do it this way was well you don't have fruit washing sinks in the in the kitchens so we said if we put a fruit washing sink in the kitchen do we have to wrap the fruit anymore they said no you just got to wash the fruit so like it was just you know a super simple like not expensive solution to a really big problem if kids weren't eating the fruit because it took five minutes to unwrap the bloody thing and it didn't look appetizing anyway.

6:02So we just had to do that with everything. And we, and we got rid of it. Instead of saying, instead of people saying, you know, this is why not. And just stopping there, you were like, well, how, how do we fix this? Yeah, exactly. And you found it wasn't that hard, right? It's a sink. It's, it's other simple things. And I think, you know, uh, was interesting. You shared with me once, it was a little subversive because you sort of started this program in the school. You did it in one school. You showed it could be done. You got them to not ship in the food from out of state, all wrapped in plastic.

6:37And you didn't really tell anybody what you were doing. And by the time people caught on, it was sort of too late. And these big food service providers that were cashing in all the government supports and making crappy food were out of business. Right. That's right. You know, so it was interesting because the one thing that we caught wind up is that the food provider, so the vendor that provided all the plastic wrapped food, that opportunity was up for bid. and so and we happened to just walk in the door as that bidding process was being set up and so the only recommendation we made because we didn't want to have anything to do with plastic wrapped food is we said make sure that you have the right to pull out any school if if you if for any reason you would want to shift the way you're feeding kids so they wrote that into the bid and and the deal was done with that in mind and we knew already like if this thing works then we're just going to be able to, you know, pull off.

7:39So, and that's what's happened. 30 schools a year have come off of that contract and have gone on to this, you know, fully managed by the Boston public schools, real whole food. So who made those decisions about the contracts? Was it the school superintendents? Was it? The head of food services. Who's terrific. Yeah. Who came from LA. She had, you know, she was trying to do a lot of things in LA in terms of shifting the food also in what they were serving there. And so she was, she was, you know, this all seemed very risky to her. And we kept saying to her, we're here to carry the risk on this.

8:14We'll, we'll make sure that like, we don't break anything. Um, and, but you know, it was her decision to put the language into the contract and she really kind of made sure that we could keep pushing forward. It was because it was complicated. Yeah, it is. I think right now we're hearing a lot of mantras about school lunch. Oh, we put in these nutrition guidelines that are better under the Hunger Free Kids Act that Obama passed in 2010, which improved the guidance on what to eat, more whole foods, more vegetables, et cetera, et cetera. Although they still passed potatoes, I mean, quote, French fries as a vegetable and ketchup and pizza as vegetables, which, you know, just still is hard to imagine.

9:02But but now what's happening is these these guidelines are being rolled back because they're saying the kids won't eat the healthy food. They throw it in the garbage. It tastes bad. It costs too much. And so they're they're rolling back these these guidelines. And yet your model shows that that's just a bunch of nonsense. Yeah. Yeah. We, you know, it's interesting. I think the one thing we did in terms of a service model, which I think changes the way kids behave around food is we, we, it's all child driven. So we, the protein is separate from the grains is separate from the warm vegetables is separate from all the cold fruits and vegetables separate from the beans, et cetera.

9:43And so nothing has to touch anything else, which is a big reason that kids don't like certain things. So if I walk down the line, right, I might take protein, I might take chicken and I might forego the rice because I don't like it, but maybe there's a roll that I want and I like the roasted broccoli or I don't like any of the hot vegetables. So maybe, but I do want an apple and I want some celery and I want a carrot, but I definitely don't want a salad and I do not want dressing, but I do want the hot sauce. So kids make their own meals. And this is not slow. This happens. There are servers on the other side.

10:20This is all within the$3.45 who are talking with kids. Kids are saying please and thank you. There's a whole conversation that's going on that wasn't happening before. And they're getting exactly what they want. They walk up the line pretty gleefully, actually. And they eat it. They eat it all because they asked for it. That's what they wanted. And there's no food waste. There's no food waste. And then we insert opportunities for kids to try things. So while they're sitting around, they're sitting at the table eating, we might say, these are chickpeas. Would you like to try chickpeas? So we introduce new foods, tofu.

10:53Tofu is like, kids love tofu now. Love it. It's just so hard to hear the argument that kids won't eat the food. I think the adults don't know how to present the food to the kids. So just to recap, the economics work. You can create better food, more locally sourced, made from scratch. All you need is a little bit of an improvement in the kitchens. Yep. You hire more people. Yep. Which still is within the cost structure. Totally. Who are happier with their jobs because they're actually cooking and making kids happy. Yeah. And the kids are happy. They're not throwing out the food. Yeah. And how's their health and academic performance?

11:37Have you tracked that? It's interesting. So we are doing, there's a study being done right now on the behavioral health because we were hearing from so many principals and teachers that negative behavioral events had gone way down in the schools. And so kids were just being disciplined less and teachers and principals thought it was because of the school food, the new school food. We don't have data yet. We are going to start doing some research on their physical health as well. But I can tell you one story that I tell all the time. There was a child who was diagnosed with failure to thrive. And part of the school's responsibility was to try to get a half a can of a protein drink into this child every day.

12:23His name was George. And I walked in about three days after the MyWay Cafe program had started in his school and the principal was kind of teary eyed. And she said, I got to tell you, she said, this boy, George told me his situation. She said, he's eating every meal. Wow. And so I ended up meeting George a week later and he said, do you know the people who make the food? And I said, oh, I do. Yeah. And he said, how do you, how does someone make a recipe? I said, oh, it's kind of like coloring. You know, if you take a red crayon and a blue crayon and you put them together, it's purple. So that's what they do, you know.

13:01And he's like, oh. And he's like, you know, I'm pretty sure that I want to be a chef. Like this is a kid who a couple of weeks ago, his pediatrician came in to see what was happening. His mom wanted to be able to bring the food home so he would eat at night. I mean, this is like a game changer. And as far as I can tell, it was his relationship with one of these newly hired cafeteria service workers who just changed his mind about eating. It was mind-blowing. It still is. So, yeah, no, when you search your kid. Yeah. And then, you know, maybe you haven't collected the data yet, but I think it's going to show remarkable things.

13:39You know, when you look at kids in schools and violent, disruptive behavior, it's a big issue. I mean, kids, one in 10 kids are on ADD medication. You know, we have to have special ed. There's, it's just, it's an enormous problem in school. School nurses are dishing out medications left to right. And, you know, we know from the studies that, you know, these are difficult kids. There's a 3 ,000 kids study, which were incarcerated youth. And they basically replaced junk food with healthier options and got rid of sugar and refined foods. And in 12 months, there was a 21 % reduction in antisocial behavior, a 25 % reduction in assaults, a 75 % reduction in use of restraints.

14:23And get this, Jill, there was 100 % reduction in suicides, which is basically, you think about it, suicide is the third leading cause of death in children's age 10 to 19. And when you look at the CDC study, there was an incredible study by the CDC looking at nutrition in kids and found that those kids perform far better when they're well-nourished. If they're not, they're basically having poor academic performance. They're having more absenteeism. They're having more disruptive behavior. They're less likely to problem solve, less likely to pay attention. but I think this is something we just don't understand that we're doing to our kids.

15:09And it's something that's completely solvable with real food. I mean, the CDC published this in a report in 2014 called Health and Academic Achievement. And it was just such a clear link between poor nutrition and poor academic performance with lower test scores, lower grades, poor cognitive function, less alertness, less attention, poor memory. It was just amazing. And so we have the ability to change this. We just don't do it. And I think the science is there. And now what you've shown is that the possibility of scaling this is there.

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17:10Two out of 10 kids now are obese, not just overweight. Four out of 10 are overweight. We're seeing this affect their cognitive behavior and academic performance. What's most striking in the studies that really shocked me was that the kids who are the most obese are also the most nutrient deficient. When you look at their vitamin and mineral levels, they are among the lowest because they're eating crap. And it's affecting their cognitive function, their metabolism, and setting them up for really bad, bad outcomes in lives, lower life expectancy, lower ability to earn higher incomes. And in schools, it's a cesspool there.

17:50sugar, salt, processed carbs, industrial refined fats. Um, and, and they lit, I mean, I, I went to the school, they had, you know, McDonald's Monday, Taco Bell Tuesday, Wendy's Wednesday, they had advertising all over the gymnasiums and bathroom stalls. Um, and, and you guys really went to work on this with the hunger free kids act to help the hunger free kids act, um, which was signed into law in 2010. Can you tell us about that and what were the challenges you found that you faced in addressing changes to the school lunch program from the food industry and from the Congress? And what was that like?

18:30There are lots of them. So when we got there, there was no rules at all about what you could sell in schools. So in vending machines and in the Alucard lines and the lunch rooms, there was literally zero standards. You could sell anything you want um and the the guidelines hadn't been updated in terms of the new european standards for the school lunch meal itself in 20 years there have been a resource for the program in 30. wow um and you know part of the challenge there's lots of different challenges uh one we were trying to do it in the middle of economic black not too you know different from what's happening right now um he's probably that was in 2008 right yeah and so you know as in we were working on this in 2000 you know through 2009 so um you know pretty pretty intense time to try to get a bill like that done um but you know for us in the administration and it by the way it took president obama intervening and push helping to push with with the first lady to get that done um you know as we think it was the bedrock of the future of the nation and so that's why it was such a priority for us um You know, I think there's a lot of challenges.

19:40One, like on the vending machines, you know, they are huge sources of revenue for things that we care about in schools like art class and music class. The schools by sports. Yeah, for sports. So these budgets have been cut so much that schools are depending on basically selling these kids junk food to keep programs that we all care about alive. So there's a real, you know, tense conflict there. But, you know, obviously, you know, killing them or prematurely over the long run, like not a solution for art. So they can they can write great poems as they're dying and great songs. You know, so we're like, it should work.

20:21We had to work this out. You know, there is huge raging. And sometimes, you know, the debates in Washington just, you know, make that leave you scratching your head. but huge debates on whether you had to just offer the vegetable to the kid or actually had to serve them. Well, he's talking about competitive foods in schools, which makes me crazy. I mean, a competitive food is a donut versus an apple. So if you put them side by side, guess which one the kid's going to pick? Yeah. Not exactly competitive. Big fights there. and you know then there was a pretty infamous effort by the Frozen Food Institute which is basically the pizza and french five is that got that made the tomato sauce on the pizza to be counted as a vegetable and french fries we were working very hard to put limit we proposed limitations on the amount of fries that could to be served in a given week.

21:24Which was also a vegetable. Right. Exactly. You didn't know? Ketchup also is a vegetable. Yeah. Yeah. And so they got Congress to intervene and they attached that onto another bill and got that through. So we were able to then increase the serving of vegetables. So you could serve brides, but you still also had to serve like broccoli or something like that. So it really kind of defeated the purpose of serving the fries. So we were able to constrain that significantly at the time anyway. I remember a story that Swanson's Pizza, which is a big pizza company in Minnesota, is the largest supplier of pizza to schools.

22:10And Amy Klobuchar, who's the center for Minnesota, a Democrat, was instrumental in getting pizza being included as a vegetable, which just goes to show you the ways in which the food industry is so influential in driving our policies, which have nothing to do with science. Yeah, that is true. We had big fights on potatoes in many arenas, similar to school lines as well as with WIC. You know, so, but I got to say, like, so there was real fights. I do think there's this like, I have gotten over the outrage that industry is going to pursue their interests. I'm sort of just like, we got to get over it and just win and just beat them at this game.

22:54And we need to be smarter and more strategic and get in power, run for office, get in power and win. So you think that the congressmen and senators would be your allies? Did you find that? I mean, clearly the food industry pushed back. Yes, sometimes they, well, we got it all passed and the bill was actually quite good. Outside of those things that I mentioned, you know, the whole grain provision, the sodium provisions, the amount of vegetables we had to serve, like all those things were actually quite very, very strong. There was enough money for the program. Could it be improved? Of course. Could it be significantly improved?

23:29Absolutely. But was it just a transformational bill compared to what was there before? Absolutely. so you know uh and it took a herculean effort to get it done at be given everything else that was going on in washington so um so you know look i mean i that was just a huge win and uh and it was there was there any follow-up data on how kids did in terms of their weight their academic performance the impact of the new school lunch guidelines? I haven't seen a robust analysis for the whole program in its entirety. The other part of the bill that we buried and didn't really talk much about because we didn't want to get to get, but maybe the most impactful thing in this bill, I don't know, one, you could debate it, was provision that basically said, it's called the Community Eligibility Program, And it allowed schools that had 40 % free or reduced, basically where the majority, almost the majority of their kids were low-income kids, you could serve breakfast to every kid in the school for free.

24:40And every kid got lunch for free. And so what's very powerful about that is not as much at lunch, but at breakfast. Because at lunch, everybody's eating together and you don't know who's who. but breakfast was only in the cafeteria for the poor kids. And so what would happen is those kids would have lunch at school. They'd go home. Most of them don't get food at home when they get there, maybe a little baggage or something. And then they'd come back to school, but they were so ashamed of being identified as poor that they would skip breakfast even though they hadn't eaten since lunch the day. And so by serving it in breakfast in the classroom and serving it to everybody, millions of poor kids are getting food that otherwise wouldn't.

25:30And so you saw there increased participation, significantly improved attendance, and significantly improved reading and math scores because those kids, can you remember when you were like 12 or 13, how hungry you were all the time? And imagine you hadn't eaten since lunch and it's now nine o 'clock, been lunch the day before and it's now nine o 'clock and you're asked to like focus. Focus. Yeah, forget it. Forget that. I could barely do that if I was full, let alone if I was strong, right? And so, you know, so it was a transformational piece of legislation in that regard. And for the district, they've seen just incredible results.

26:14There's been challenges to implement it, but those resources remain and more and more districts each year are signing up for it. And so, you know, I think we have to be careful. Like things are messy and politics is messy and you're going to have people laughing for their own interests or their businesses. Sometimes in ways that, you know, I can understand sometimes that I find disgusting and just boring. Are there stories of what you experience that, you know, kind of reveal the underbelly of what you're fighting against? I mean, look, it cut both ways. I think, you know, when we banned trans fats, which, you know, there was an attempt to try to figure out from the industry side, you know, if they could still, because of a few people who wanted various icing and other couple products where, you know, it was harder to replace.

27:03They wanted to, like, go fight to try to allow a certain level in under the ban. Am I allowed to swear on this podcast? You can. I mean, and I told a lot of them, a head lobbyist for these guys. Like, if you want to have that fucking fight, like, let's go. Because I cannot wait to take it to you on this. If you want to make sure that you're pumping trans fats, that is a known killer. Like, let's go at it. So, you know, there's people like, that's like clearly something that was killing everybody. A very specific thing that had ample evidence. And sometimes you're just like ready for a nasty fight.

27:40But I will also say, and it's important for everybody to understand And there's a lot of nuance and a lot of gray. So there's some issues like pizza as a vegetable or trans fat, which is a black and white issue. But there's a lot of other companies that have done tremendous work to try to make it easier and more affordable for families to get decent food that are working with real constraints from Wall Street. You know, like if CEOs try to change too much too fast and lose some revenue in a three or six month period, they're going to get fired. right so there those efforts are you know what would be undone in a minute so if you're trying to get something to change there's the pragmatism that has to be taken and by the way like a lot of people talk about wanting to eat better and how we need better food but consumers you know uh tend to eat what they eat and tend to like pretty unhealthy food uh and that's because that food likes them it's addictive and it sort of sets up the biology of that's hunger and craving and addiction which is very hard to fight with willpower and that's part of the problem i told that that's absolutely right but it's also a real problem for the industry so they've created they box themselves into a problem of creating you know highly craveable food and now it's there it's people want it and they like it and they identify themselves with eating it so it becomes the whole you know what we eat is really how we understand who we are yeah and so when you start to change you're saying you want to change me as a human and so it's it's super complicated and people aren't changing as fast as we think they are and so for some for a ceo who's like i get it like my portfolio is not good i'm sure gotta make the real change it's not like they're in the position to say i get these products are terrible i'm just gonna get rid of them like yeah well they're innovating these companies are innovating they're getting the crap out they're reformulating their product.