School Food Is the Key to Fixing Our Children’s Health Crisis | Nora LaTorre

We're in a crisis right now with kids and it's sort of this invisible thing that nobody's really talking about. For the first time in human history, the average child born today will live sicker, shorter lives than their parents. Life expectancy of an obese kid is 13 years less than a kid who's healthy. You know, at Eat Real, we looked at the entire food system and asked ourselves, well, what is the best lever to create health for our kids.

We really saw that schools are the big bet to create health because what you said, they're the largest restaurant chain in America. They're bigger than Subway, Starbucks, and McDonald's combined. They serve 30 million kids, 50% of their nutrition. It's like if we want to stop disease before it starts, schools are the lever. Nora La Tere is CEO and co-founder of Eat Real, a national nonprofit transforming school food systems and advancing evidence-based nutrition policy to improve children's health.

We've gone all in just helping kids have access to delicious, nourishing food that helps them learn, grow and thrive. And it's working, and it's working fast. We went from 50,000 kids to a million kids since then. And one of our schools in our program just removed 34 pounds of sugar per student per year.

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