Many school systems across the country are taking steps to remove unhealthy foods from their snack vending machines in the hopes of improving overall health of students. It is a small but helpful way of improving adolescent wellbeing and may lead to better food habits later in life.
Offices are following suit by removing unhealthy snacks form vending machines and eliminating soda vending machines altogether. Companies are seeing it as a great way of cutting a company’s health insurance costs and improving the health of office employees. Changing the vending machines are just one of new policies that many companies are endorsing. Companies are also offering rebates on gym memberships and nicotine patches, encouraging employees to bike to work, and putting bottled water in soda vending machines. In these ways, companies are saving money on health insurance.
Not everyone is pleased with these changes, however; with some disgruntled employs clamoring for their favorite sugary snacks and citing the change as an invasion of privacy. To those few I say: “No one is forcing you to eat the health food. If you want that candy bar so bad, then it won’t kill you to walk to the corner store to get it.”