Eating a healthy, balanced diet plays an essential role in maintaining a healthy weight, which is an important part of overall good health. Schools offer vending machines, placed in various locations around the school, for a quick and inexpensive snack.

Many students take advantage of this and buy a snack daily, that sounds like a great idea, right? The controversy is many parents, teachers and even some students disapprove of the idea of school vending machines because of what is inside the machine. Most of the vending machines are filled with unhealthy snacks such as Doritos, Pop Tarts, Lays Chips and candy bars. Students gravitate toward these types of snacks instead of healthier options, and occasionally a nutritious choice isn’t even available to begin with.

Schools claim they have replaced sodas with low calorie, healthy sports drinks. This idea of “healthy” is a Mountain Dew Kick Start with its prime ingredients being Caffeine, Sucralose, Acesulfame potassium and high fructose corn syrup. Another issue is the amount of sugar in each serving with each 16-ounce contains 20g of sugar. According to the American Heart Association, the daily recommended amount of sugar for women is 25g and for men it 38g, which means that if you drink two cans of Kickstart, you’ve already surpassed your daily amount of allowed sugar intake.

Of course it is normal and perfectly healthy to treat yourself every now and then and eat your favorite candy bar, but kids are choosing these types of snack daily. Especially being at school five days a week for seven hours, it is crucial that we are fueling our bodies with nutritious and nourishing foods that will help our bodies function correctly. When we are at school, our brains and working extremely hard and we need every ounce of energy in our bodies to focus and retain information. By giving our bodies nutritious foods, that will fuel our body and give us what we need to perform at our best ability. By eating junk foods, our bodies cannot perform at our highest performance and could negatively affect our focus and learning ability.

So, the overlapping question here is what do we fill the vending machines with instead? If we fill the machines with apples and raisins, it is almost guaranteed that students with simply choose to eat nothing over these foods. The solution is simple, fill the machines with healthy, yet still satisfying foods that will appeal to students. Fill the machines with smoothies, yogurt parfaits, trail mix, granola/protein bars, Skinny Pop and fruit cups. Talk to the students and see what their preference or favorite healthy snacks are and put them in the machines!

Be mindful or what you are eating at school and remind yourself of what will benefit your health the most. Speak up to the principals and lunch ladies to make the switch in your school vending machines.