Trump Administration Rolls Back Obama-Era Nutrition Standards For School Lunches (arstechnica.com) 788
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Just a week into his position, U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Perdue announced Monday a rollback of nutrition standards for school meals, previously championed by former First Lady Michelle Obama as part of a larger initiative to improve the health of America's children. Under Perdue's new rollback, schools across the country can now delay a requirement to reduce sodium levels, can serve kids fewer whole grains, and can provide one percent flavored milk in addition to flavored skim, unflavored skim, and unflavored one percent. In a news release that declared the move would "make school meals great again," Perdue said: "This announcement is the result of years of feedback from students, schools, and food service experts about the challenges they are facing in meeting the final regulations for school meals. If kids aren't eating the food, and it's ending up in the trash, they aren't getting any nutrition -- thus undermining the intent of the program." Specifically, under Obama-era nutrition rules, schools were supposed to decrease sodium from meals in three phases. For instance, 2012 school lunches had average sodium levels between roughly 1,400mg to 1,600mg, with elementary school lunches on the lower end. Federal dietary guidelines, which schools must follow, recommend kids get 1,900mg to 2,300mg or less of sodium per day (depending on age). Currently, schools have dropped down to "Target 1," which is a range of about 1,200mg to 1,400mg or less. Schools were supposed to get that down to about 900mg to 1,000mg this year ("Target 2") and then to between 600mg and 700mg by 2022 ("Final Target"). The USDA will now waive the requirement to reach Target 2 until 2020. The USDA will also grant exemptions from the current requirement for schools to serve only whole-grain-rich foods.
Low fat whole grain? (Score:5, Insightful)
To be fair, the regulations are trying to push a low fat whole grain diet, which I don't believe is actually healthy. Fat is essential for brain development, our kids definitely shouldn't be eating low fat.
Re:Low fat whole grain? (Score:5, Interesting)
That actually reminds me... One thing I remember from when I was growing up, is that my parents had whole milk in the refrigerator for the kids, and skim milk for the adults.
Re:Low fat whole grain? (Score:5, Informative)
skim "milk" is not milk, it's water with white colouring. So is that "1%" stuff. Even that 3.2% stuff what's the best of what's readily commercially available is nowhere close to actual milk.
Around my place, a couple decades ago, farmers tried selling milk directly to consumers, which got wildly popular but got cracked down on hard. As at the time it was still customary to boil milk before use, it wasn't unsafe, either.
Re:Low fat whole grain? (Score:5, Informative)
Uhm, no. Skim "milk" is made by separation, "whole" milk undergoes filtering but no separation. Here's [wikimedia.org] a simplified graph.
And around here (a 50k town, Poland), shops don't even carry skim water anymore, and often don't carry 2% demilked "milk" either. Even poor people don't buy that crap. On the other hand, I wonder why UHT milk imitation products still exist...
Re:Low fat whole grain? (Score:5, Insightful)
Homogenization isn't done through chemicals, it's a mechanical process where milk is put through a filter at high pressure. Personally I think it's better, and it's done for taste/texture/consistency. People don't like lumps of butter in their whole milk, etc.
Pasteurizing is done to all parts of the milk that you drink, of course. It wouldn't make sense to just make some of the milk germ-free and then mix it back together with unpasteurized portions of the milk. Also not a chemical process (heating).
All milk is skim only in the sense that all lemonade is water. I mean I know tastes are subjective but let's be honest: skim milk is vile. And there IS more water in skim milk....it has less fat per volume, so consequently it has to have more water per volume to make up for that.
Re:Low fat whole grain? (Score:4, Interesting)
Wow, you should try unhomogenized milk, it beats homogenized milk by a mile. Lumps of butter in their milk? Is that the best you can do, run down real milk with a straw man? Real milk where the cream rises to the top is the best!
Comment removed (Score:4, Funny)
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Yeah, my parents knew a family with a dairy farm, and we would regularly drive out there and get a big pail of milk, fresh out of their cows (well, from a large holding tank). Between that and lawn darts, we barely made it out of adolescence.
Re: Low fat whole grain? (Score:3, Interesting)
Not all milk. Here in NYS, we have a loophole allowing farms to sell raw milk directly from the farm. It's worth the drive out once a week to pick it up. I was raised on fresh raw milk from a Jersey cow milked by the family. Milk just ain't the same if you don't have to shake it a bit before opening...
Re:Low fat whole grain? (Score:5, Funny)
Don't knock it until you try it.
Re:Low fat whole grain? (Score:5, Insightful)
True. These "nutrition standards" are based on the same principles as the USDA food pyramid, which has been for the most part shaped by lobbyists, not nutritional experts.
Re:Low fat whole grain? (Score:5, Interesting)
As opposed to the Paleo nuts who claim 6000 calories a day will cause weight loss, while 2000 calories a day will cause weigh gain
As if that's the only alternative to the food pyramid.
My diet: eat real foods, including fresh meat, dairy, nuts, fish and vegetables. Avoid processed foods, including sugar, and grains. Not too much sweet fruit. Eat when hungry.
Nothing crazy, but much higher in fat/lower in carbs than recommended by the food pyramid, and similar to what people ate before the obesity epidemic, except that I probably have more variety (such as year round fresh vegetables).
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It's expensive, and it doesn't work.
Eating real food saves a lot of money on doctor bills. Some of the food is actually very cheap, especially the fatty cuts of meat, organs and bones, while providing superior nutrition. Plus the high fat content makes it a lot more filling, so often I only eat 2 meals a day, and I almost never eat snacks. I can prepare a healthy dinner for the price of a big starbucks beverage.
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Schools don't pay the medical bills. They pay for the food, and junk food is often cheaper than real food.
Re:Low fat whole grain? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Low fat whole grain? (Score:4, Insightful)
So do the japanese. They have lower obesity than North Americans.
Hawaiians, however, have integrated high sugar into their diets.
Re:Low fat whole grain? (Score:5, Funny)
It will, if the rest of the day involves paleo activities like "20 km mammoth chase" and "1 km sprint from sabertooth tiger".
Re:Low fat whole grain? (Score:4, Funny)
The in-between days with 500 calories help to balance the paleo lifestyle, too.
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And then you will be nice and thin when, like your paleolithic ancestors, you die at the ripe old age of 28.
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Those are mean averages that include child mortality. People surviving to adulthood had similar lifespans as humans today.
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Re:Low fat whole grain? (Score:4, Informative)
It's surprising what scientists learn when they actually look, which is why it's important to fund research.
The gold standard in calorie consumption measurement is something called "doubly labelled water [wikipedia.org]" -- basically a scheme for measuring energy use using water tagged with uncommon isotopes of hydrogen and oxygen. The incorporation of these isotopes into metabolic by-products provides an indirect means for measuring metabolic rate in real world conditions.
So researchers did a doubly labeled water study on the Hadza of Tanzania, one of the few remaining hunter-gather societies in the world, and discovered that there was no significant correlation between activity level (measured by GPS) and calorie consumption. While they did exhibit more energy usage than sedentary westerners, it was only on the order of 200 calories/day -- which admittedly over a year is a lot of calories.
Now it's a mistake to extrapolate from the Hadza to people living in industrialized economies. The Hadza are smaller, leaner, much more active and eat a much different diet which varies in calorie content every day. But the most important thing to take away is the unreliability of the naive "scientific" model of the human body as being like, to a first approximation, an insulated calorimeter that can only shed energy by exercise.
Re:Low fat whole grain? (Score:4, Funny)
You dietary nuts! I just watch out that all my meals contain the four important food groups, i.e. fat, salt, sugar and caffeine, and I'm doing fine.
On a completely unrelated note, what's that coppery taste in my mouth?
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Well I can tell you I did Atkins for several years, and I lost a lot of weight eating 5K calories a day and often more!
After I reached a weight I was happy with I gradually transited back to a more typical diet with some input from my physician, but I have had to get the calorie count down to around 1800 a day to keep the weight off.
So anecdotal it may be, but it sure as hell worked here.
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How do you gain weight? By your body using insulin to store blood sugar as fat. Dietary fat never becomes blood sugar. Dietary fat cannot be stored as fat. It's all simple chemistry.
I'm not on such a diet, but these are facts.
Re: Low fat whole grain? (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, but the reason they are doing isn't cause they children need more fat to have healthy diet, it's cause the food industry through SNA lobbyist want give kids cheap processed foods that tend to be high in fat, sugar, additives, and sodium.
It putting corporate profits over children.
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Do you have a link to where you got this insight into the minds of the people changing this rule?
Because if you don't, then you're simply interpreting a motivation according to your political preconceptions, of course?
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Do you have a link proving that the people changing these rules have minds?
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Dear Derpy World,
You mistook the idiotic stuff in the media in places with freedom of speech for knowledge of our system. Please take two clues, and don't call us in the morning.
Signed, America.
PS: Nuts.
Re: Low fat whole grain? (Score:5, Informative)
Increasing the fat content of food makes it far more expensive to produce, because animal products
Let me stop you there. "Fat" here is not the white stuff on the outside of bacon. "fat" is a nutrient present in most organisms.
Go read the nutritional label of a bottom of rapeseed (or canola, I'm not sure what you call it in the states) oil. I'll save you the effort: Per 100ml, Fat: 94g
Also not all fat is equal. Unfortunately the stuff you get in processed food, and the stuff they are trying to get out kids meals is also the worst of the bunch.
As for being "disingenuous" the definition of "fat" is widely recognised in science. It would be disingenuous to redefine it just for the sake of your own incorrect argument.
Re:Low fat whole grain? (Score:5, Insightful)
To be fair, the regulations are trying to push a low fat whole grain diet, which I don't believe is actually healthy. Fat is essential for brain development, our kids definitely shouldn't be eating low fat.
True. But the low sodium requirements should have been kept in place as is. That likely would have happened, if this move had been designed to favour students' health; instead, it was designed to simultaneously cut costs, boost the profits of the crap-meisters who peddle highly processed foods, and take yet another cheap shot at the previous administration. When they say this will "make school meals great again", it's pretty hard not to laugh. Where's Sinclair Lewis when we need him?
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Low-sodium diets also have some pretty serious problems with lack of any repeatable evidence of efficacy.
Re:Low fat whole grain? (Score:5, Insightful)
Low-sodium diets also have some pretty serious problems with lack of any repeatable evidence of efficacy.
Indeed.
Too little sodium --> You die
More than the recommended sodium --> you live
Lots more --> There is a very very weak correlation with a minute increase in blood pressure that is heavily confounded with the many things that go along with high sodium diets and is more than offset with for example walking for 10 minutes a day.
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It's not quite that simple, even though what you say is true.
If you get used to a high-salt diet, i.e. from childhood, you'll have difficulty cuttiing down because things just taste bland without the amount of salt you're used to, and it can be difficult to switch to other flavours instead. BTW, you can miss out on a lot of wonderful flavours if your food is overloaded with salt.
Then your taste buds lose sensitivity with age, and you add more salt, lather, rinse, repeat. And that adds to your kidneys' workl
Re:Low fat whole grain? (Score:4, Insightful)
In my much younger years I developed an interest in cooking, I was also earning minimum wage. So I had to make sacrifices - one of which was to completely stop adding salt to my food (mostly because I couldn't afford to buy salt).
Thing is, I came to like it - now it's nearly 20 years later, I cook with much better quality ingredients and have turned it into a craft. My wife loves my cooking. My kid loves my cooking. I cook lovely and elaborate foodie kind of meals with interesting flavor mixtures and prepared in interesting ways... and I still almost never add salt to anything I cook.
The vast majority of fresh foods already contain more than enough salt for your health needs, you don't need to add more to be healthy. And you only think you need it for flavour because you've been overdosing on it for decades. Stop adding it, and very soon not only do you stop missing it - the food tastes BETTER without it.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Your comment is just about the biggest load of horseshit I've ever seen on this site, and I've seen some horseshit in my days.
A can of Morton's iodized salt or its generic equivalent, which should be more than enough for an entire year's cooking for an individual, costs less than $1 at many US supermarkets. You say you spent all your money on "fresh fruits and vegetables." Well to put that in perspective, a year's supply of salt costs about what a single apple would at most supermarkets. You also say in o
Same "chart" applies to water (Score:3)
Too little water >> you die
Too little sodium >> you die
Around recommended amount >> good
Double amount of recommended amount >> your body attempts to adjust itself to the situation by getting rid of water through, e.g. urinal, sweat, etc. Can cause overhydration, water retention, and hyponatremia (leading to, ironically in context, too little sodium in cells).
Too much water >> you die
Everything should be done in a moderate way.
But at least climate science is settled, right? (Score:3, Funny)
The science isn't settled in just about every field, they're still arguing over sodium, theoretical physicists are still arguing over gravity! Apparently only the very best scientists work in climate science, they're the only ones where the science is settled.
It does make me wonder, if their science is settled, why are they still getting paid to do more climate science?
Re: Low fat whole grain? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Obesity (along with diabetes II) is caused by carbohydrate intake. Not fat.
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Obesity is caused by eating too many calories.
And eating too many calories is caused by hunger, which is caused by insulin, which is caused by carbohydrate intake.
Good explanation here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
Re: Low fat whole grain? (Score:4, Informative)
>Whole grains are universally accepted as healthy
No they are not. Anyone who has paid attention to the science for the past decade should have serious doubts about whole grains being healthy.
Since I do not accept whole grains as healthy, then your statement of universal acceptance is untrue. But it's not even close to being true.
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more fat = more calories
The missing factors here are appetite and satiety. If you reduce carbs, and eat more fat, you feel fuller for a longer time. Even though the fat contains more calories per gram, you'll eat less of it, and reduce calories overall.
Re:Low fat whole grain? (Score:5, Funny)
Because if there's anything Donald Trump knows, it's how to have a healthy diet.
Re:Low fat whole grain? (Score:5, Insightful)
To be fair, the regulations are trying to push a low fat whole grain diet, which I don't believe is actually healthy. Fat is essential for brain development, our kids definitely shouldn't be eating low fat.
The US has the highest proportion of obese children of any rich nation, so lack of fat is probably not what holds back brain development in children in America. And it is not fat in gneral that is essential - it is specific, fatty acids, such as omega-3, not the saturated or hydrogenated fats that processed foods are full of. What most children in the West need more than anything is much less food of a much better quality, and outdoor activities. For Heavens' sake, there are children that die of heart attacks and strokes because of this absurd overeating epidemic that plagues the West - especially the US.
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The US has the highest proportion of obese children of any rich nation, so lack of fat is probably not what holds back brain development in children in America
Eating too many foods with sugars and carbohydrates is a sure way to get fatter even one eats a diet low on fats.
100 ml of Coca cola are 42 calories and 100 ml of whole cow milk are 61 calories, the latter contains more fats. On the othe hand one feels more full after drinking a glass of latte or better milk and coffee rather than a glass of coke, so one will normally eat less calories in total.
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To be fair, the regulations are trying to push a low fat whole grain diet, which I don't believe is actually healthy. Fat is essential for brain development, our kids definitely shouldn't be eating low fat.
They shouldn't be eating the amount of sodium in the processed fast-food grade shit they serve either, which applies to all humans regardless of age.
Chances are it was the new sodium requirement that was the real bitch to deal with. You can make healthy food taste good, but dealing with bland food is often answered with three days worth of sodium overkill because it's a cheap flavor enhancer.
Re:Low fat whole grain? (Score:5, Insightful)
the thing is, the kids will still get far too much fat, sodium and other 'bad' stuff in everything else they eat
Some will. Some won't. My kids eat healthy at home. I don't appreciate the government feeding them garbage at school.
Kids weren't eating the food (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:The kids in the low income areas were eating (Score:5, Informative)
No it's about waste. You can find the articles over the last couple of years on it, but some schools saw lunchroom garbage increase by 80%. The entire obama admin idea on lunch was garbage from the start.
What good is healthy? (Score:5, Insightful)
If the students refuse to eat it? Would it not be better for educating students if they were neither experiencing growling stomachs or suffering from food comas?
Being on the "I'd rather starve" end of the spectrum is not desirable from a development and learning standpoint.
Food for thought.
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this sounds incredibly like "my kids will only eat mcdonalds".
this is beyond retarded. if you want kids to eat a certain way, lead them to water. at the VERY LEAST it doesn't set in their minds that it's perfectly normal to eat fucking sugar-fruit, sugar-milk, and frozen food every day. that's the bare minimum net effect that I can think of. at best, a good portion of the kids in the united states will eat the lunch and wont die from a malnourishment coma.
Don't forget lunch shaming... (Score:5, Informative)
If the parents forgot to pay off a previous balance for school lunches, the kid's lunch gets thrown into the garbage to shame them. Only in America...
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/30/well/family/lunch-shaming-children-parents-school-bills.html [nytimes.com]
On the first day of seventh grade last fall, Caitlin Dolan lined up for lunch at her school in Canonsburg, Pa. But when the cashier discovered she had an unpaid food bill from last year, the tray of pizza, cucumber slices, an apple and chocolate milk was thrown in the trash.
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It's a shame the kids have to suffer for their parents not paying their bills but there are programs in most of America for kids to get free school lunches if their parents are low income enough. While the article begins with a case of clerical error for the little girl who got her lunch thrown away the fact is that can not be the reason for most of the kids being refused food (or even as the article states, given cheese sandwiches or the like). To me it seems like the real bad guys here are the parents who
About time. (Score:5, Insightful)
I've eaten with my children and the school meals are terrible. Every kid thinks their school lunch sucks, I'm no exception, but by comparison I was given haute cuisine. If it was actually healthy I could nearly forgive it, but the plans are built on junk science.
Being happy with the results of anything coming from our current president makes my stomach churn. Nonetheless, this is a good thing.
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Enough to not kill you, but still too little is very painful.
Experientially speaking, it makes you not want to eat any food that doesn't have enough salt on it. Literally you'd rather starve than eat because of the lack of salt.
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"The first recorded cases of cancer appear about the time and place that wheat agriculture began."
The first recorded cases of cancer are in ancient Egypt. They happen to correspond exactly with the earliest surviving medical texts. Cancer has always been around - it will kill all multicellular organisms in the end, unless something else kills them first.
Re:About time. (Score:4, Interesting)
Let me address you point by point.
The American diet is NOT AT ALL in danger of being salt deficient. Salt is in fact the cheapest of additives to our food. Your concern is nonsense and there is plenty of evidence that the massively unnatural salt abundance in our modern diet isnt doing us any favors.
It is widely excepted that whole grains are better for you than bleached and heavily processed grains as they are far less likely to spike your blood sugar levels.
Veggies are intrinsic to every diet dietitians consider healthy.
In summary, your concerns are right up there with anti-vaccine types.
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Okay, first link
https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/n... [harvard.edu]
Whole wheat breads and pastas coming in better than the garbage you describe.
Now I'm not saying low carb and avoiding most of that shit isnt better for people with blood sugar issues. What I am saying is that you're wrong.
Obligatory Jim Gaffigan joke (Score:4, Insightful)
Most health food gets corrupted anyway. Like the granola bar. That's been completely corrupted.
Because you know initially some guy was like, hey kids are eating candy bars, right? All we got to do is shape granola like a candy bar, kids will eat the granola.
And then like a week later, uh Bill, kids are not eating these granola bars.
Well, all you got to do is put chocolate chips in the granola bar. Kids will eat the granola.
Uh, Bill, kids are picking the chocolate chips out of the granola bar.
All you got to do is cover it in chocolate. Get rid of the freakin' granola. I gotta tell you how to do everything?
And now, obligatory link to Jim's website:
http://www.jimgaffigan.com/pro... [jimgaffigan.com]
Get off my lawn! (Score:3)
And I had PB&J sandwiches, a lot! And I liked it!
I think we can agree on some basic principles (Score:5, Insightful)
School lunches should be balanced in nutrients. They should be available to any student regardless of income level. They should be fresh. And students should want to eat them, to enjoy eating them. I think these are core principles that any reasonable American can agree to.
The problem is that this is not what school lunches are: they never have been, nor should anyone with a brain have any illusions that the Trump administration's rollback would do anything meaningful to solve the problem.
Do you really want to know why school lunches suck? Because Americans are hypocrites. They talk about caring about education. They talk about caring about children. A balanced diet is a critical part of those priorities, yet when it comes down to the putting the money where their mouth is, nobody wants to pay to feed them real food. Oh, you will hear how parents say they want the freedom to choose what to feed their kids...but let's be brutally honest: Americans are fucking fat and they didn't get that way by making good dietary choices for themselves, did they? So if they can't stop guzzling sodas and calling frozen pizzas "dinner," what do you think their kids will eat?
But how dare I question the inviolable rights of a parent to choose whether to give their kids cardiovascular disease and Type 2 diabetes? Because we live in the Land of the Free...free to gorge yourself on Chick-fil-A and Burger King, that is. And with the fast food industry essentially using an addiction model to sell their poison, is it any surprise that kids (and their parents) would choose to eat a high-fat, high-salt, high-sugar diet?
Americans are hypocrites: they howl at the idea of being told by anyone else what they can and can't do, but when it's time to pay the consequences of their own poor choices--the millions of dollars spent on their cancer, diabetes, and heart disease--suddenly, it's someone else's fault, someone else's responsibility.
At some point, you have to decide to make a stand and say, "I the taxpayer, am willing to pay more now to ensure that your kid eats right, so that I don't have to pay more later to subsidize the lifelong health consequences of the shitty lifestyle and dietary choices you made for your kids because you're too fucking stupid to be a parent." Freedom doesn't mean freedom from responsibility.
If you doubled the school food budget and cut out all the factory farm subsidies and waste, and hired real cooks to make lunches, these kids would be eating real food. And the cost savings would be enormous. And if you have even the slightest bit of intelligence you'd know that the food industry drives these policies: their profit relies on addicting each new generation on junk food.
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School lunches should be balanced in nutrients. They should be available to any student regardless of income level.
I don't think people agree on this, it's a major source of conflict right now.
,They should be fresh. And students should want to eat them, to enjoy eating them.
Tastes vary. If my school offered fresh mixed fruit and it contained melon, I would have thrown it away (and still would, because melon is the foulest of fruits).
I think these are core principles that any reasonable American can agree to.
I'm not trying to make a joke or throw around hyperbole, but can we be so certain that even half of the American population is reasonable? As in they are able to recognize a logical argume
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"School lunches should be balanced in nutrients. They should be available to any student regardless of income level. ... And students should want to eat them, to enjoy eating them."
Pick any two.
Re:I think we can agree on some basic principles (Score:5, Interesting)
You've never seen a Japanese school lunch. It is not a coincidence that, despite the higher rates of smoking (which, along with obesity comorbidities, is the most significant lifestyle choice that affects lifespan), Japanese life expectancy is higher in both sexes compared to Americans? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Teaching kids about food is not simply about telling them what they can or can't eat. It's about leading by example and modeling good dietary choices.
Could be actually a good thing (Score:4, Funny)
After the publication in 1980 of USDA dietary guidelines [usda.gov] the percentage of obese people in USA started to rise.
Same thing happened in the UK with the introduction of the Eatwell plate.
I think that all stems from the idea that eating fats and cholesterol make one fat, so the energy intake should be based on starchy foods like rice, potatoes and refined wheat: these are foods with a really high glycemic index so the starches are rapidly converted in glucose, the pancreas stats to produce insulin and the glucose is transformed in fat. Then normally the level of glucose in food decreases and the brain registers it as starving and if food is readily available one eats again the starchy foods, that are healthy. Unfortunately this is a sure way to eat too much.
Eating some fatty food, like cheese, eggs, olive oil, nuts or meat requires more times to be digested and the glycemic response is much lower, so one feels more satisfied to eat.
In this case I think thast giving to kids "boring" foods makes them eat more "tasty" food like snacks and fried potatoes, that are high in calories and surely not "gourmet" foods, making the whole dietary advice moot.
If in schools they start to serve a real pizza margherita made with buffalo mozzarella, olive oil, fresh tomato sauce and freh basil, maybe the kids will get a more decent taste for good food, istead to eat some baked thing called pizza made with leftovers
Good. (Score:3)
I don't recall "school lunch program" being part of the federal government's responsibilities.
If this is something that concerns you, then go to your state. The feds have no business here.
Giving parents more control (Score:3, Insightful)
In the spirit of Saint Reagan
Oh, be fair.
The regulations were many, and often at odds with each other and at odds with the goals of School Nutrition Association [schoolnutrition.org]. It was pushed by Michelle Obama with little or no input from nutrition experts or the aforementioned group, and caused so much anger with it's one-sided dictates that Michelle's "food policy czar" was asked not to speak/hand out awards [breitbart.com] at the SNA association dinner.
School regulations are the purview of state, not federal. It's much *much* better when the local population has a
Re:Giving parents more control (Score:5, Insightful)
Schools are managed at the local level. Whether they are better off depends on whether or not you live in Kansas.
Regardless, nutrition is reasonably well understood and not something for which we need 50 laboratories of ideas. Something like 0% of American kids are sodium deficient and my fingers are too fat to google what percent are obese.
Regarding the SNA's preference not to have the "food czar" present an award and the SNA's (very related) preference for the status quo ante:
Nineteen former SNA presidents wrote a letter of dissent and several expressed worry that the food industry was unduly influencing the association’s position, for which it was aggressively lobbying on Capitol Hill — moves that led the White House to believe that most school nutrition leaders are on its team and agree with the changes.
http://www.politico.com/story/2014/07/white-house-school-nutrition-association-108874
But there is no denying that Trump is, as the kids say, salty.
Re:Giving parents more control (Score:5, Insightful)
"School regulations are the purview of state, not federal. It's much *much* better when the local population has a say in how their kids get schooled"
No it's not, that's how we ended up with the garbage they were and / or are serving now. That's literally why these steps were taken because local government wasnt doing anything. Sure, I loved nacho day when I was a kid but when I think back on the food in my school cafeteria I cant believe that they were feeding us that shit and from everything I've ever read my school's menu was normal by American standards. We have a health epidemic of childhood obesity in this country and school menus are most certainly a contributor, particularly for low income kids who are more prone to obesity and depend on free school lunches for a "proper meal". The "locals decide the menu" method has shown itself to be a complete failure.
And for the nutrition nerds out there, I dont think the Obama era rules are perfect but they are most certainly better then what most schools were offering.
Aaaaand I just read your Breitbart article which you apparently did not, Right there in the article:
"Nineteen former SNA presidents wrote a letter against the waiver rider and asserted they were wary of the influence of the food industry on SNA’s position. Half of SNA’s operating budget comes from the food industry. With 55,000 members across the nation, SNA is fighting the new nutrition regulations, which include limits on sodium and orders students to have a serving of fruit or vegetables so their school is eligible for USDA reimbursement. "
So yeah, SNA is not so creditable you hack.
Re:Giving parents more control (Score:5, Interesting)
Bullshit. My kids reported that the meals at school turned completely awful after these regulations were put in place. Tiny helping of whole grain crappy, super bland food. Lots ended up in the garbage.
Re:Giving parents more control (Score:5, Insightful)
Your completely anecdotal (and probably politically bias) review of school food has been noted (and lets face it, kids love junk food and will complain about getting switched off of it). I will continue to celebrate any measure taken to help combat the childhood obesity epidemic in our country.
If your kids were getting the same school food I was getting when I was a kid you werent doing them any favors by buying it for them. If they don't like the new stuff then maybe pack them a lunch? It's cheaper and can be healthier. It's probably what your parents did when you were a kid and is super simple to do.
Re: (Score:3)
Of course kids love junk food. Welcome to our evolutionary baggage where it was a survival trait to enjoy food that is high in calories.
The difference is that today there are no starvation times when we have to survive on what's around our waist.
Re:Giving parents more control (Score:5, Informative)
The problem with most junk food is that it's both high in carbs, as well as fat. That's a combination that's very rare in nature, but it's very addictive. When you eat such a combination, the carbs will provoke an insulin response, which causes the fat to be stored, and the sugar to be used as immediate fuel, as well as converted to glycogen. Fat burning is reduced, because high blood sugar is more dangerous to the body than high fat.
After a while, the fat is stored, and the sugar is partly used, partly stored, and blood sugar starts to drop again. The body starts sending out hunger signals, while reluctantly burning some fat. You start eating again and the process starts again.
Because the body doesn't burn much fat (there's a constant supply of sugar), it reduces the number of enzymes required to burn fat, so it becomes more dependent on the sugar. This reinforces the cycle.
If you cut back on carbs, it takes a few weeks for the body to adapt to increased fat metabolism, but after that you have much reduced hunger, and less need for carbs. Weight falls off easily.
He's just the anti-Obama (Score:5, Insightful)
Lets face it, Trump didn't really consider ANY of that. He wouldn't have studied any of the rules, or considered any of the science. He wouldn't have assigned a researcher to look at it.
No, the only thing Trump did, was see it was an Obama rule and do the opposite.
Because that is what Trump defines himself as: the opposite of Obama.
Hence the Trump inauguration cake that copies Obamas but was sligthly bigger. The piss on the Moscow hotel bed Obama slept in. The Obamacare ill conceived replacement. The cancelling of Obama sea reserves, the removal of Obama net neutrality.
It's not that lazy fucker Trump knows or cares about any of it. He only knows it was an Obama rule.
He really is nothing, not even defined by himself, he's defined by whatever he's attacking. At the moment its Obama, so he's attacking everything Obama did, even if it means siding with Putin and attacking America.
Mostly right and completely wrong (Score:5, Insightful)
> Trump didn't really consider ANY of that. He wouldn't have studied any of the rules, or considered any of the science. He wouldn't have assigned a researcher to look at it.
Pretty much right. Well he doesn't assign a specific researcher. There are two MILLION federal employees. The president doesn't assign research tasks - he doesn't even know the researchers' names. He knows the names of the department heads - a couple dozen of the millions of federal employees. What Trump did is he told all federal agencies, in one memo, "review all of the regulations that Obama made on his way out the door". Then Trump was off to deal with North Korea or the budget or health care or China or Russia or jobs or taxes or whatever. School lunch regulations are about number 5,762 on a president's priority list. So the agency head forwarded that memo "review all recent regulations" to his top management, who forwarded forwarded it to someone who deals with lunch standards. And this manager, who has never seen the president, undid some of the recent changes.
> It's not that lazy fucker Trump knows or cares about any of it.
Right. He's a little busy with trying to learn whose who in Chinese politics to prevent wars, find out what the federal reserve is up to trying to keep the economy afloat, have some general input on the federal budget, etc.
> He only knows it was an Obama rule.
He doesn't know or care if someone that Obama's wife talked to decided on skim milk or 1% or 2%. He likely doesn't know that school lunch standards were changed under Obama - those two million federal employees handle that stuff.
What the president knows is this:
Obama's administration made a bunch of regulations that liberals like. In the final few months, knowing they would be replaced regardless, they went a little wild. So his team of more conservative people should tell their people to have a look the changes done by Obama's people and consider doing things differently.
That's what President Trump, or any president, knows. They don't read millions of pages of federal regulations.
Re:He's just the anti-Obama (Score:5, Insightful)
B) The subject of this article. Low sodium, high whole grain diets are what is killing Americans.
Utter bullshit. Hardly anyone's eating, low sodium, high wholegrain diets. Mostly, it's high in sodium and high in very refined carbs.
If school kids get full fat milk and properly seasoned meat, then they will be better off.
And you know, vegetables.
A) Getting rid of the department of education. The net effect of the DoE has been strongly negative on schools and pupils. Dems might think it's a bad thing to do,
As a card-carrying liberal, as far as I can tell, the US school syllabus needs to be nuked from orbit---it's the only way to be sure. Killing the department of education won't help unless it's replaced either at the federal or state level with something better. Given the "something better" is basically going to involve paying teachers a lot more (doubly so for ones teaching in areas where they can almost always get better jobs elsewhere) and finding actual genuine subject area experts along with actual genuine teachiIf you thinng experts to figure out what to teach and how.
But that's (a) expensive, (b) ignores the Jebus made our cows in 7 days lobby (c) ignores other lobbies and (d) involves effectively ceding power to those untrustworthy prevert commernist academic teacher types. Who knows? They'll probably fluoridate our kids or something.
Some dems might think scrapping the dept. of education is bad, and I probably agree: if it's simply scrapped there's a risk the replacement is even worse. Beware of people very keen on getting it scrapped: many are likely to want to use the hole to push their own agenda in schools. The other problem with the department of education is it gets pushed around by congress. Scrapping it won't fix that, congress always has an agenda, so they'll simply push around whoever is left in charge.
IOW just because it's bad doesn't mean scrapping it will help.
Re:He's just the anti-Obama (Score:5, Informative)
Is he a (mostly self-made) billionaire?
It's not clear he is a billionaire. He has claimed to be, but he's prone to bullshit and examining what's known of his finances suggests he wasn't a billionaire before he entered the White House. I've not doubt that he will attempt to gorge himself on the riches available from his new position, though, given that he has refused to give up his assets that are causing conflicts of interest, has used his new position to promote his daughter's business, etc etc.
And he's certainly not self-made: he inherited a huge amount of money.
Re:He's just the anti-Obama (Score:5, Insightful)
The piss on the Moscow hotel bed Obama slept in.
People actually believed that fan fiction and upvoted this?
I wouldn't have believed until a few days ago that Trump would like to talk to Kim Jong Un not because he wants to avert a war but because HE ACTUALLY ADMIRES HIM (just like he admires other strongmen like Putin, Erdogan, Duerte). But that's exactly what he does. I've always been as anti-Trump as it gets. But even I am still thinking too conventional when it comes to Trump. Too rational, too strategic. Whenever you believed Trump was doing something out of strategic consideration or rational insight, chances are you'd be proven wrong at some point. You tend to assume that Trump would make decisions like normal politicians or just normal reasonable adults do, and you tend to be proven wrong. Trump is making decisions like an eight year old, fawning over friends and hating "bad people". He can be talked into and out of things in ten minutes and he believes whatever adult he's last spoken to.
So yeah, you'd assume he didn't do that thing in the Moscow hotel bed, because adults don't do such things. And then, you might be proven wrong.
Re:Giving parents more control (Score:5, Insightful)
School regulations are the purview of state, not federal. It's much *much* better when the local population has a say in how their kids get schooled. Common core and "no child left behind" was a disaster.
Schools are better off managed at the local level.
Everyone knows that.
I call bullshit.
What actually happens is that local school administrators think they're better off, because they can put more money into the football program and cut out that high-falutin' nerd crap. After all, kids just don't need that fancy electronic stuff to run the farm. It was good enough for their grandpa, good enough for their pa, and it's good enough for them.
Yes, it's a stereotype, but all too often it holds true. Under the banners claiming "locals know best" and "parents know best", you find an army of last-generation people whose education hasn't actually progressed since the 1970s. The myths they grew up with become fact in their mind, and the priorities and politics of their small-town local life becomes the focus of a stagnated culture. Without mandates and guidance from an emotionally- and geographically-detached administration, the local schools are far more likely to base the curriculum on a local economy, effectively denying their students the skills needed to participate in a modern global society.
I was fortunate enough to have grown up in one of the outliers. In my area, the school superintendent had been an engineer for the government, and had moved around the country before settling in my little farming town. Previously, the school had used a curriculum focused on American history, home ec, and shop class, but the new administration fought to diversify the programs. We got a new arts program, computer lab, and even (much to parents' disgust) made wood shop an elective!
The end result was that is was possible for a student to learn more than their family's farming trade, and eventually afford to actually leave the town. The immediate effect was that there was a "lost generation", where graduates left the town, either for college or for jobs elsewhere. In the longer term, however, those students ended up being the most successful, with some of the highest-paid careers the school has ever produced.
In comparison, the neighboring district generally held that a proper education focused on physical strength and good morals. Last I heard, a drought had devastated their local farming economy, and the district had about 85% population below the poverty line.
A modern workforce demands a diverse skill set, and having a self-reinforcing education system eliminates opportunities for the students' skill set to widen. Schools are better off managed with input from all levels, providing students with options to make their own course through life.
Everyone knows that.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
The end result was that is was possible for a student to learn more than their family's farming trade, and eventually afford to actually leave the town.
That's great for the students, but from the town's perspective, they just lost all of their best and brightest to the global economy. Most of those kids won't be coming back as working adults. It's happened all across the US: these towns get smaller and smaller until they're left with a ghost town.
They might be wrong, but I don't think you can really fault them for protecting their own best interests.
Re:Giving parents more control (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm glad my dad, the straight D high school student, was wise enough to understand this. Yep, he pushed us kids to get a good education, and we've got 7 college degrees between 3 kids to show for it. Also the closest we live to that little town is an hour away. I'm a thousand miles away.
I don't keep up with my HS classmates anymore, because nothing has changed for them in the last two decades save more kids and more poverty. They still revel in the glory days of winning touchdowns and prom parties, while I'm flying around the country on business and exploring different cities.
I don't know how the town I grew up in is still there. I don't understand how it functions economically. Well, I guess I do. Families live in the same house for generations, long paid off. Hardly anyone buys new vehicles, and everyone spends their free time doing odd jobs and farming to make extra money. Dad has a big vegetable garden and beehives. Barters fish and game for favors and services. Gives Dale up the road a couple gallons of honey and ten pounds of venison and Dale drops of a dump truck of wood from the lot he's clearing, which dad cuts and splits.
Not a lot of leisure time, and always one step from economic disaster. The house my great grandparents bought when they immigrated to the country has been a hole in a ground for about a decade now. (Not owned by our family in a generation.) A former classmate was renting it and burned it down. The owners didn't have it insured, and don't have any money to replace it, so it's an overgrown hole in the ground now. It's not the only one either. Steady uptick of houses falling into disrepair and trailers replacing them. Trailers with mortgages, because there wasn't enough money for maintenance on the old house.
It's hard to be sad when these towns finally die, because they are literally falling down. If you don't have enough money to fix your roof, the solution isn't to get a mortgage on a trailer so you don't have to change your way of life. The solution is to retrain, reskill, and improve your quality of life. My family history is mining, machine shops, and dairy farming. My siblings and I have STEM degrees, plenty of employment options, and make very good money. Those people still trying to hang onto the past are missing out on life. I just don't get why refusal to change for the better is a thing.
Literally everything you wrote is false (Score:3, Insightful)
The regulations were many, and often at odds with each other and at odds with the goals of School Nutrition Association. It was pushed by Michelle Obama with little or no input from nutrition experts or the aforementioned group,
Literally everything you wrote is false.
Obama worked with top experts on nutrition. [politico.com] These guidelines were the product of the best current science in conjunction with many in the industry itself, not politics and certainly were not arbitrary "dictates."
The SNA originally supported the law [aljazeera.com] when it was passed in 2010.
The board has since flip-flopped to the serious consternation of many of their members. [foodpolitics.com]
And the cause seems to be due to the fact that they are overwhelmingly funded by food suppliers. [aljazeera.com] One of th
Local population don't know better (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Local population don't know better (Score:4, Insightful)
Local populations are also very inconsistent.
If you left it up to the local populations, most of the schools in Alabama would be teaching that Jesus is coming next year, evolution is a hoax made up by nazis to justify genocide, and climate change consists of those pages the teacher carefully cut out from the textbook. And the students would all live off of pizza and pie. Made with proper lard, not that low-fat hippy stuff.
Re: (Score:3)
The rules are largely written by processed food industry representatives, with the help of some paid research. Remember how trans fats were touted as a healthy alternative to saturated fats ?
Re: (Score:3)
Does anyone in the US send their children to school with packed lunches, or is it something of a social stigma to do so?
When I was a kid here in the US (back in the days of gas lamps and horse-drawn carriages), it was about 50-50. My family didn't have a lot of money, so we mostly packed lunch. But there were a couple school lunches I really liked, so I always lobbied my folks to let me buy lunch on those days.
My daughter usually preferred to take lunch to school, although in her case it was because she and her friends preferred to have their short lunch time (35 minutes, if I recall correctly) to have fun versus stand in li
Re: (Score:3)
And they are full of crap for good reasons:
1. Crap is cheap. School budgets are always tight.
2. The kids universally love it. Who doesn't enjoy pizza?
Re:Chocolate milk and pizzaboats are back! (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3)
By that logic, why do we teach kids things they don't want to learn? Why not just teach them Snapchat?
It's sound logic, usually. Most of the shit they do teach them is useless, a lot of it is politically motivated indoctrination designed to instill the values of not thinking or at least thinking the "right" way. And of the useful shit, most can't learn it or will forget it soon after.
How many adults struggle with basic math? When was the last time they taught English grammar and spelling? But hey, they make kids memorize the states and capitals, the order of US Presidents, and other such useless things.
Re: (Score:3)
No, "in other words" schools are again contributing to eating habits that will shorten children's lives. There's nothing wrong with encouraging eating habits that will help combat the childhood obesity epidemic in this country.
Re: (Score:3)
Yes, because everyone wants to eat a couple of crackers, a piece of cauliflower and a few slices of meat. Which is considered a complete [netdna-cdn.com] lunch [dailymail.co.uk] under the Obama nutrition standards. I don't know about you, but when I was in school I would have been hungry again in about 45 minutes with that little food.
Re:Chocolate milk and pizzaboats are back! (Score:4, Insightful)
Oh, you have link to photos? We should feed our kids crap food because you have links to photos of small meals then?
Re: (Score:3)
Tell me how you want to force the kids to eat it. Until you can do that, they simply will not.
If you have kids, you should know that they can be surprisingly creative and incredibly stubborn when it comes to not eating what they do not want to eat.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
This.
You can lead a donkey to the water, but you cannot make him drink. Likewise, you can offer healthy food to kids but guess what: They don't like it and will refuse it.
Remember when you were a kid? Remember when your parents packed you "something healthy" for the lunch break? What did you do? Eat it? Probably not. Throw it away and buy something else? More likely.
This is pretty much what happened after the change for "healthy" food. Kids simply said "this sucks" and refused to eat it. Instead they took t
Re: (Score:3)
And as soon as you can FORCE kids to eat it, you actually have a point.
Re:Federal Juvenile Lunch Police Stand Down (Score:5, Insightful)
Perhaps it shouldn't be, but when state and local governments have proven unwilling to so much as acknowledge the problem of unhealthy school meals in most areas, it has to fall to the federal government to intervene.
Re: (Score:3)
It was never the Federal Government's business what a school kid was eating for lunch.
If the thing the school kid is eating is unhealthy and contributing to kids on the whole being physically unfit and sick then it is every bit the Federal Governments business, or rather duty, to fix that just like it was and is their duty to fix the water situation in flint Michigan. And yeah I know the Feds have been dragging their heels on the Flint situation but at least they did something to fix this school lunch situation. Now the current admin is spending it's time un-fixing the school lunch situation
Re: (Score:3)
Sodium only has an effect on hypertension if you have a particular sensitivity. Otherwise your body still manages to keep it in balance as long as you're not dehydrated. The demonizing of sodium is starting to get ridiculous.
At home, I salt my food with sea salt - equal proportion of sodium and potassium so there wouldn't be a risk anyway.
Re: (Score:3)
Dear mods, you may disagree, but this is certainly not trolling. For shame.