By Jim Brown
A nutrition expert is criticizing the Big Apple's lucrative deal with the Snapple® Beverage Company.
Not long after banning candy and soda from its public school vending machines, the City of New York has agreed to a five-year, $166-million deal with Snapple Beverage Group, a division of Cadbury-Schweppes. The company has become New York's first official corporate marketing partner in a new marketing and asset centralization plan to increase the city's revenues.
Under the new agreement, Snapple becomes not only the official iced tea, water and chocolate drink vendor for New York, but also the exclusive provider of water and fruit juice products to the city's 1,200 public schools.
Although proponents of the plan favor it as a way to give schoolchildren healthy alternatives, some critics point out that the self-proclaimed “best stuff on earth” may not be such a healthy option after all. While Snapple beverages contain some added vitamins and trace amounts of other nutrients, many of the all-juice blends have slightly more calories and sugar than a can of Coca-Cola®.
Dr. Nancy Krebs is a professor of medicine at the University of Colorado at Denver and chairwoman of the American Academy of Pediatrics Committee on Nutrition. She is among those who feel that having juice vending machines in schools does little to improve children's health. The doctor believes that, if New York officials are attempting to fight childhood obesity, they are going about it in the wrong manner.
“Juice can be abused just as much as soda,” Krebs says, “so if they think they're doing a good thing by replacing the soda with juice — it's perhaps a [slightly] better option, but minimally so — and you can get overweight on juice just as well as you can on soda.”
But the pediatrician suspects the city's deal with Snapple is just an attempt to make more money on unnecessary eating and drinking. In fighting juvenile obesity, the doctor warns that adults should pay attention not only to what children eat and drink, but also when.
“I think that people need to be a little careful about this, in that it's not just soda — it's eating. Why do our children have to have access to food and drink all the time? We don't need to eat continuously,” Krebs says.
The children's health specialist and professor of medicine says by providing constant access to high-calorie, low-nutrient snacks, schools are not doing students or teachers any favors.
(This article courtesy of Agape Press).
