The New York Times has an editorial today in favor "free breakfast in all classrooms" of the city's public school system. The editorial says, "Mayor Michael Bloomberg has argued that providing free breakfast in the classroom might increase childhood obesity, a claim that most experts would vigorously dispute. Studies have shown that breakfast with fruit, yogurt and other nutritious foods can help fight obesity by cutting down on the urge for junk food later in the day."
Typically, the Times includes no hyperlink to these "studies," and does not give the author or the date or place the studies were published. Nor does the paper say how many students were in the sample group of these studies, or over how many years they were studied, or whether there was a randomly selected control group. The Times editorial describes yogurt as a "nutritious food," and prescribes it for breakfast. Yet a Times magazine cover story that appeared less than two weeks ago under the headline "The Extraordinary Science of Addictive Junk Food" reported about General Mills:
The company's Yoplait brand had transformed traditional unsweetened breakfast yogurt into a veritable dessert. It now had twice as much sugar per serving as General Mills' marshmallow cereal Lucky Charms. And yet, because of yogurt's well-tended image as a wholesome snack, sales of Yoplait were soaring, with annual revenue topping $500 million. Emboldened by the success, the company's development wing pushed even harder, inventing a Yoplait variation that came in a squeezable tube — perfect for kids
There's also often plenty of fat and cholesterol in cow's milk yogurt if it isn't nonfat or lowfat.
The Times editorial also doesn't have any information about how much it would cost to provide school breakfast to everyone, or any suggestions on how to pay for it, or any reason why childless taxpayers already burdened with the costs of educating other people's children should be taxed further to subsidize their breakfasts, or why parents who enjoy making and eating breakfast at home for their children should be taxed to subsidize the parents and children who don't. Would food stamp payments for families with school-aged children be reduced by the amount of the cost of the breakfast? Or are we talking about an overall increase in the amount of the food subsidy to a population, again, whose main problem is less hunger or malnutrition than it is obesity?
I'm not necessarily against a healthy breakfast being served at school, but all in all, it's not a particularly convincing editorial.