Kansas Health Institute | Information For Policy Makers. Health for Kansans.

TOPEKA — Two Senate committees are set to consider bills regarding nutrition and wellness in schools and restaurants.

Senate Bill 499 aims to keep junk food from being sold in schools by requiring that all districts adopt "exemplary" wellness policies.

SB 505 would require restaurants to print nutrition information, such as calories, carbohydrates, saturated fat and sodium on their menus.

The bills are exempt from legislative deadlines.

The school wellness bill is in the education committee. The menu labeling bill is in the health committee.

School nutrition and wellness

All Kansas schools are required to have wellness policies on file with the state, said Jodi Mackey, director of Child Nutrition and Wellness for the Kansas State Department of Education.

More than 90 percent of schools use the guidelines for wellness programs that have been adopted by the state board. The wellness programs are divided into three categories: basic, advanced, and exemplary.

The exemplary guidelines prohibit the sale of high-fat and high-sugar food in vending machines and school stores. Drink sales are limited to water, low-fat or skim milk, and other healthy offerings.

“The bill would require schools to adopt the healthiest level (of the guidelines) by July 2011,” Mackey said. “This would be a significant change because, at the current time, it’s voluntary.”

Because of the way the department collects information, It’s not clear how many schools currently have exemplary wellness plans, Mackey said. A wellness plan must be updated with the state at least once a year but districts are encouraged to update more often.

Dr. Jason Eberhart-Phillips, state health officer for the Kansas Department of Health and Environment, said passage of the bill would send a “consistent message” to children who are learning about nutrition in health and science classes.

“This would help them have cues in their environment that support the healthy nutrition that they’re learning about in class,” he said. “Otherwise, it really undermines the purpose of the curriculum.”

About a quarter of the state’s high school students are considered overweight or obese, Eberhart-Phillips said.

The Kansas Association of School Boards will likely testify against the bill – not because decreasing junk food is a bad idea - but because state mandates are difficult and sometimes costly for local school boards to enact, said association spokesman Mark Tallman.

“Many districts have made changes in this area,” he said. “We’re always concerned about new state requirements, particularly those that may have some impact on school districts’ costs. As we are looking for ways to cut costs and operate more efficiently, we would be very concerned about any new mandates.”

The bill has been scheduled for a hearing on Wednesday in the Senate Education Committee. The committee meets at 1:30 p.m. in Room 152-S of the Statehouse.

Menu Labeling

The bill that would require restaurants to print nutrition information on menus and signs is “the easiest, lowest-hanging fruit imaginable to try to impact the obesity problem in our state,” Eberhart-Phillips said.

Studies show that even trained nutritionists struggle to estimate how many calories and grams of fat they consume in a meal at a fast food restaurant, Eberhart-Phillips said.

“We get all the information we want about the price of food, and we know how much we’ve got in our wallets to spend,” he said. “We have no idea how much out of a 2,000 calorie budget we can spend to maintain a healthy weight. We can come up with hard things to do, like taxes on unhealthy food. How about just giving people numbers and letting them make their own decisions?”

A study in Los Angeles County, Calif. suggested that if 10 percent of fast food patrons ordered food with 100 fewer calories each time they ate out, residents would gain 38 percent less weight in a year, Eberhart-Phillips said.

Menu labeling also has been discussed at the federal level as part of health reform legislation. And that is where the decision should be made, said Don Sayler, chief executive of the Kansas Restaurant and Hospitality Association.

“We are not particularly against menu labeling, if it’s done in the right fashion,” he said. “We’re against the state-imposed requirement. We think it needs to be a national bill instead of a state-by-state patchwork.”

The National Restaurant Association has supported the federal legislation, Sayler said.

Sen. Jim Barnett, R-Emporia, chair of the Senate Public Health and Welfare Committee, said he was receptive to hearing the bill. But, he said, he asked the proponents and opponents to agree on the bill's language before scheduling a hearing.