When it comes down to it, most students would rather pay $1 for a bag of Chex Mix than $3 for a fruit parfait.

While Park has made an effort to offer healthier lunch options, these are often overlooked by students who instead favor a large variety of unhealthy snack bar options. This lack of healthy food variety leads students to choose less nutritious snacks.

This trend is not limited to Park, across the nation, one in three children are considered obese, according to the United States Department of Agriculture.

A part of this problem is attributed to less than stellar school lunch choices, leading the nation to improve school lunches by adding more regulations and nutrition guidelines.

While full school lunches cost $2.80, excluding those on free and reduced lunch, they only include three fruit and vegetable choices. Double ups cost $2.25 and extra fruit, vegetable, milk or bread is an additional 55 cents.

However, unhealthy options are available as well, such as ice cream and chips for only for $1 each. Often students lean toward the latter of these two choices and as a result, have an increased sodium, fat and calorie intake.

The cafeteria staff are making efforts to increase their variety of healthy options. The snack bar no longer serves excessive king sized ice cream treats instead are offering healthy options including banana bread, zucchini bread and granola bars.

According to Kathleen Milbrath, the director of school nutrition, the cafeteria is on having smaller portions of meals that are under 200 calories and have less than 35 percent of their calories from fat.

A larger part of the problem, however, is that students are ultimately the ones who need to make the decision about what they are going to eat. Even with more healthy options, students are responsible for their own healthy choices.

To start this change, Park needs to have a larger variety of fruit and vegetable choices for an cheaper than snack bar options in order to truly help students make a healthy choice.