Steubenville, OH -- According to the Centers for Disease Control more than 9-million children are overweight. That's 16-percent of school-age kids, nearly three-times as many as 25 years ago, making childhood obesity a problem that has captured the nation's attention.

We originally set out to find out why so few schools offered salad bars. Was it the high cost of produce or government bureaucracy? What we found instead is that overall, student nutrition is plagued with a series of flaws that all contribute to one big deadly problem.

This is school lunch today - french fries, nachos, pizza and the list goes on - And so do the pounds - and as students grow, so does the epidemic of childhood obesity. But given healthy alternatives like this salad bar - would kids make better choices? One student laughed when asked whether he would choose a salad bar over french fries. In fact, we couldn't find a single high-schooler in this lunch line who wanted a salad bar. And believe it or not a high school nutritionist says that's a good thing. Kathleen Lazor says, "Salad bars are tough for lots of reasons."

One reason is the school lunch program itself, the strict regulations of what is or isn't a school lunch, can make some salads ineligible for a make-it-or-break-it federal reimbursement - and then there's the paperwork. Lazor adds, "It is somewhat intensive, paperwork intensive, and sometimes it does make it difficult for us to feed students to meet all of the requirements." And even if you do meet Uncle Sam's requirements and fill out his paperwork -all you get in return is twenty-one cents. Twenty-one cents is what Uncle Sam chips in for your child's nutrition. And with twenty-one cents you can make a school serve veggies, but you couldn't pay these kids to eat them.

Healthy foods can be disguised as junk foods - like these vitamin fortified juice smoothies - and even pizza. Lazor says, "Lots of times there's whole wheat or soy protein in the crust." But some schools can't afford fancy food decoys - some can't even afford fresh food - why?

In fact, a twenty-one cent federal reimbursement goes a lot further in a sack of frozen french fries than it does in a stack of fresh apples, and forced to pinch pennies and do bureaucratic backbends, schools often choose the fries and so do the kids.

Add it all up and these finicky fingers, these fried foods, these feeble funds, and the fathoms of federal regulations all come together to contribute to the perfect storm for kids - childhood obesity. But who's to blame? We asked the man at the top of the nation's nutrition pyramid - the Secretary of Agriculture Mike Johanns. "Is there any one group that's to blame for that - no," says Johanns. "I think if we all accept responsibility whether that's schools the secretary of agriculture, parents, whatever I think we can get on top of this situation and raise a generation of healthier kids."

But school nutritionists fear it could get even worse before it gets better, as Congress considers cutting back the twenty-one cent school lunch reimbursement.

While the government reimburses schools twenty-one cents for a regular school lunch, it gives schools more students who qualify for free or reduced lunches: $2.24 and $1.84 respectively. Since the national school lunch program began, more than 187 billion lunches have been served. In 2003, the National School Lunch Program cost taxpayers $7.1 billion.

For more information you can visit these web-sites:

Food and Nutrition Service-USDA.

Healthy Youth.

Healthier US.

My Pyramid.