How Bill Put the Fizz in the Fight Against Fat

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The agreement the negotiators eventually reached was unveiled with plenty of fanfare and not a little hyperbole. "It's a bold step forward in the struggle to help America's kids lead healthier lives," Clinton said. Maybe, but the terms are hardly airtight. Sweetened drinks will still be available at after-school events that parents attend, such as plays and games, and kids remain free to load up on sugar on their way to school. "We'll just get it someplace else," says Zach Pilkington, 15, a student at Valley Southwoods Freshman High School in Des Moines, Iowa. "It's not going to change anything. It's just going to tick people off."

Health experts disagree. "If it's right there, you're more likely to buy it," says psychologist Lisa Altshuler, director of the Kids Weight-Down Program at Maimonides Medical Center in Brooklyn, N.Y. "If you have to walk across the street, you'll be less likely to bother."

The plan's slow rollout is raising eyebrows. The Clintonites and the American Heart Association seem to trust the companies when they say they need time to renegotiate their beverage contracts with the schools and retrofit their vending machines, but for some people that doesn't wash. "They have to be kidding, no?" asks New York University's Nestle. "Implementation by 2010? Today's kids will be grown up by then. I read this as a ploy to keep the vending machines in the schools at any cost."

Also troubling is the financial cost to schools when the beverage spigot is partly closed. The deals that administrators strike with drinkmakers often go to pay for such comparative luxuries as athletic programs and yearbooks; if the kids don't take to the healthier drinks, revenue will fall. For Brainard High School in Chattanooga, Tenn., vending-machine sales have meant an annual cash infusion of as much as $17,000. "I think the deal will hurt us," says school bookkeeper Robin Cavin. "We pay the insurance for athletics out of that. Who will replace it when it's gone?"

The die, however, has probably been cast for all junk foods in schools. Talks between the Clinton team and the snackmakers that provide the other goodies stuffed into school vending machines are under way, helped in no small part by the fact that the companies confront the same kind of regulatory chaos that the sodamakers faced. Pepsi--a major snackmaker--is a player in this deal too, as are Kraft, General Mills, ConAgra, Unilever, Mars and others.

Next, work should get started on cafeteria food, which, since 1946, has been subsidized by the National School Lunch Program. The law imposes general nutritional guidelines, but they are broad enough to let plenty of fried, fatty and starchy foods slide through. The Clintonites plan to bypass the government and negotiate directly with catering companies, purchasers and school nutritionists. Negotiations with fast-food restaurants--where kids spend an awful lot of social time, often without their parents--are employing another strategy, focusing less on adding healthy menu items that kids don't often eat and more on cutting back the fat and calories in pizzas, fries and other things they serve.