No free lunch: The cost and national security implications of school lunch

On September 30^th, I attended a Leadership OK conference with an emphasis on health. Oklahoma and the United States have some disturbing statistics related to our health, specifically the obesity rates. The surprising part is how far reaching the implications are.

Along with presentations from Oklahoma state leaders, the conference had Chef Ann Cooper, the “Renegade Lunch Lady” as one of the speakers. She  is a classically trained chef who works to expose the problems of and solutions to the high fat and low nutrition school lunches that are provided in most districts around the country.  Those of you with school aged children should spend some time looking at the information on thelunchbox.org.  Even if you don’t have children, the rest of this post will explain why you need to be aware of this and concerned about the implications of this policy. She emphasized how important it is to start good habits while children are young.

The next speaker was even more sobering, but had some of the same themes related to the obesity epidemic in the U.S. Dr. Michael Rozien is the Chief Wellness officer for the Cleveland Clinic. Among other themes, he shared a focus on youth with Chef Ann; by the time we, as employers, hire someone, their eating and wellness habits are largely set. This means that bad eating or exercising or smoking habits learned at an early age need to be broken in order to bring down the cost of health insurance. So saving money now on school lunch or physical education programs may cost us all more in the future. You can see more about his work on his website.

The disturbing piece related to Dr. Rozien’s presentation was this interactive map. There is no way to get the changes over time to show up in the blog post, so please click the link to see it on the CDC’s website. It is sobering. The policy implications of the increase in obesity rates across the U.S. since 1990 are multifaceted. One point that Dr. Rozien emphasized, aside from the staggering amount of money spent on obesity and other lifestyle related illnesses in the U.S., was that the real medical costs associated with obesity are not immediately felt. In fact, he estimates that the costs lag by 15-20 years. That information, combined with the timeline established by the CDC of an obesity epidemic starting in the early 1990’s, means that we may have a balloon payment coming due in health care in this country.

Surprisingly, the policy implications related to obesity carried on to my Leadership OK visit to Fort Sill the following day. I was not expecting public health and childhood obesity to be such a strong part of the Ft. Sill experience, but it was a recurring theme. In conversations with officers from Major General Halverson to Colonel Rave (Commander, MEDDAC), it was stressed that only 3 in 10 (actually a little over 27%) of eligible age people in the U.S. qualify to be in the armed forces. This percentage is down over the last decade, primarily due to health issues related to obesity. Officer after officer expressed the concern that the continuation of the trend toward an increasingly obese population is a matter of national security.

When we think about the staggering 30.3% of Oklahomans who are considered obese, it is not only clear that the causes for that are multifaceted, but that the implications of that extend beyond what we may even be realizing at this point. The decisions we make, even at the local level, regarding how we fund government programs and services reflect our priorities and shape our future as a state and a nation. Is minimizing the cost for school lunch really a savings to the tax payers in the long run?

The real take away here is bigger than just school lunch. It is on the interconnectedness of the different aspects of our society and the way policy decisions shape outcomes. We all need to keep the long-term costs and consequences of our short term policy decisions in mind.

Individuals and the community share responsibility for health outcomes. We expect people to take care of themselves, but policy decisions play a role in health and wellness also. If Oklahoma is to prosper within any national health framework, we must encourage healthier lifestyles and support healthy outcomes. Public policy should encourage community and individual choices that make Oklahomans healthier.