the good news: chronic disease is preventable and reversibleThis also means no advertising, vending machines, or sponsor-
ships from large food companies on school campuses that sup-
port non-whole-food items such as soft drinks, candy bars, energy
drinks, and highly processed foods in general. Additionally, par-
ents and educators alike should aim for eliminating soft drinks and
caffeinated sports drinks from school cafeterias and vending ma-
chines—period! Encourage water consumption or at least mineral
waters or 100 percent non-sweetened natural juices as the “in”
thing, and our children will benefit immensely. Why do we allow
unhealthful foods to be fed to our kids in schools as the norm? Be-
cause too many of us allow ourselves to consume this kind of diet!
A successful model that should be replicated across the coun-
try for healthy nutrition advocacy for school children, as well
as educating the public and policy makers on the importance of
whole-food, plant-based school nutrition, is the New York Coali-
tion for Healthy School Foods (Healthyschoolfood.org). This group
helped create the excellent illustration shown at the end of Chap-
ter, 1 “U.S. Food Consumption as a % of Calories” for which I am
very thankful, since it makes teaching about the problems of U.S.
food consumption patterns simple and evident.
Diet and the Big Three:
School Behavior, Criminality, and Work Productivity
Another wonderful interview I had the privilege of conducting
was with Barbara Stitt, former chief probation officer in Ohio for
two decades; former co-owner of the whole-food bakery Natural
Ovens; and book author, speaker, and child nutrition advocate.
This interview was profound in three ways. First, she discovered
that feeding probationers whole-food, unrefined diets reduced
their recidivism from getting into trouble again from 85 percent
down to 15 percent. Second, she and her husband, Paul Stitt, fed
their more than 120 employees daily at their Natural Ovens bak-
ery only whole foods, resulting in marked reductions in healthcare
claims, increased work productivity in their employees, and gen-
eral enhanced employee contentment. Third, she and her husband