Zuni schools binge on fruits and vegetables

ZUNI PUEBLO, N.M. (AP) — More students at Zuni Pueblo are snacking on fruits and vegetables instead of chips and candy these days. It's the hope of school officials that even after a government grant stops providing free healthy snacks, students will hang on to their new eating habits.

Cups full of strawberries, apples, honeydew melon and carrots, broccoli and cauliflower or other raw treats are being handed out each morning to the nearly 2,000 kids in the pueblo's seven schools thanks to a $6 million grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

It's part of an experiment aimed at improving the diet of school children across the nation.

The government is trying to figure out whether kids who are accustomed to eating good, fresh fruits and vegetables every day will become fitter rather than fatter.

Lou Enote, coordinator of the program at Zuni, said the kids love the fruits and veggies and early evidence shows they are stopping at the local convenience store less frequently for less healthy snacks.

Their parents like it, too, because they are spending less money for junk food to feed hungry kids.

Teachers and administrators say the students learn better when they feed their brains vitamins and minerals in between meals.

Zuni is coping with the effects of a change in tradition. Fruits and vegetables were staples of the diet in the days before Spanish settlers, reservation lands, government housing and food commodities deliveries.

Zunis have moved away from traditional farming and hunting, and traditional diets. Fast food restaurants are steadily moving in, giving people opportunity to choose a more fatty and less nutritious diet.

A combination of diet, lack of exercise and genetics has led to dire levels of diabetes at the pueblo. One in four adults at Zuni has Type II diabetes and children are being diagnosed with the disease with greater frequency.

Enote, the school food services manager, had those figures in mind when she applied last year to be a part of the government grant that would buy fruit and vegetables in public school districts in four states and on one Indian reservation.

The USDA, already responsible for providing food subsidies for Indian reservations, breakfast and lunch to public school children and other food programs, launched the experiment to gain more understanding of teens' eating patterns.

The data collected from Zuni along with the other school districts in Ohio, Indiana, Michigan and Iowa will be evaluated.

The results so far at Zuni show that students are eating less junk.

"They're saying, 'I don't stop at the store after school,' " Enote said.

But it's too early to tell whether kids are beginning to prefer fruits and vegetables or whether they are simply less hungry for a salty or fatty snack, Enote said.

"They're eating things they didn't even know existed," said Enote, listing kumquats, star fruit, kiwis and pomegranates as examples.

The down side to the experiment, however, will come May 30 when it expires.

After the funding cuts off, the school district will more than likely revert to its former menu of breakfast and lunch.

The hope, Enote said, is that by then they will have become fruit and veggie converts and they'll put an apple in their backpack or stop at the store for a banana, not a candy bar.