Will kids opt for healthier snacks?

Can healthy snacks sell as well as sweets and soda in school vending machines?

The Utah Department of Health wants to find out.

The department is approaching a handful of school districts, asking them to compare sales from an all-healthy fare machine to that of traditional machine snacks, Rachel Cox, registered dietician with the Utah Department of Health's heart disease and stroke prevention program, said Monday.

She declined to name the districts because they have yet to give the green light.

But the Murray Board of Education is interested in participating — and in knowing how it all turns out, Superintendent Richard Tranter said. "We have a great desire to provide the very best health program for the kids."

The state health department says 1 in 4 children in Utah is overweight, and almost 12 percent are obese. Childhood obesity rates are rising nationally, too.

The data concern some Utah officials. And some are turning their sights on vending machines.

The State Board of Education urges schools to offer long enough lunch times so students won't forego long meal lines for easy-access machine snacks. Rep. Patricia Jones, D-Cottonwood Heights, has unsuccessfully carried legislation to regulate vending machine junk food.

Vending machines have become sacred cows in Utah public schools. Their profits — which Jones says can include exclusive soft-drink contracts worth hundreds of thousands of dollars — help fund academic and extracurricular activities in a state that gives less per student than any other. State efforts to regulate them have not been taken kindly.

But some districts are creating their own rules.

Wasatch School District last month became Utah's first to limit vending machine and classroom sweets. It, among other things, now requires 70 percent of student vending machine fare — allowed only in the junior high and high school — to be water, milk, 100 percent fruit juices and foods meeting district minimum nutritional standards.

Whether the vending machines will turn a profit remains to be seen. But health officials and a study indicate they will.