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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. 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 when it was passed in 2010.

The board has since flip-flopped to the serious consternation of many of their members.

And the cause seems to be due to the fact that they are overwhelmingly funded by food suppliers. One of their largest donors was previously responsible for getting pizza declared a vegetable. The SNA no longer advocate for children's health, they advocate for business's profitability at the expense of children's health.

Schools are better off managed at the local level.

Everyone knows that.

Everyone knows that kids need the same nutrition regardless of where they live. The law does not mandate meal choice, only nutrient content. Every school is free to follow their own direction within the guidelines.

I swear, I don't know why anyone trusts what you write anymore. You regularly tell bald-faced lies which you then pad with misrepresentations and to top it off you cite breitbart. WTF dude? Breitbart?

That study has been repeatedly discredited as poorly designed.

Chemically, HFCS-55 (most used in soft drinks) is pretty much indistinguishable from "natural" honey as far as sugar content goes. Your body can't tell the difference.

HFCS is like sucrose that has already been calved into glucose and fructose. Your intestine does not - CANNOT (more caps) - absorb sucrose whole. The enzyme responsible for the calving, sucrase, does its job for a typical serving of sugar in a few minutes.

There are issues with drinking sugared drinks (juice, soda, sweetened tea etc.) in isolation, without food, but it makes no difference whether the sugar is "natural" or not.

And yet the effects in mice are clear.

Actually, no. They are not clear at all.

Empiricism trumps hand waving.

Fine, and when those results are replicated a few dozen times, the conclusions will be on much firmer ground.

You should phrase that as "One study found that soda contained up to 65% fructose, with most samples containing more than the expected 55%".

The blog linked by that blog links the article (along with having nicer analysis):

http://www.foodpolitics.com/2010/10/new-study-hfcs-sweetened-drinks-higher-in-fructose-than-expected/
http://goranlab.com/pdf/Ventura%20Obesity%202010-sugary%20beverages.pdf

So the study doesn't make the soda look very good, but the authors note that they didn't do enough tests to generalize the results (they only used 1 lab and gathered all the samples in LA).

Here, read this:

http://skeptoid.com/episodes/4157

people will site 'studies' about HFCS. usually this one:
http://www.foodpolitics.com/wp-content/uploads/HFCS_Rats_10.pdf

HINT: it's not really a good study.

Jokes on you, I have read the study, and now so can you:
There is ONE poorly done study, and it's results don't support its hypothesis very well at all.

http://www.foodpolitics.com/wp-content/uploads/HFCS_Rats_10.pdf

Note how there finding don't really support the data.

You're calling media relations a "PR department"? You're comparing a small group of people who put out press releases with the massive industry-funded disinformation campaign which organizes massive denier conferences and offers prizes to scientists who can publish papers that support their position. Please, get serious here.

You know, not all PR departments are nothing but lying conspirators out to twist and hide the truth. Most company PR departments do nothing but put out a little press release with some boosterism and self-congratulating -- just like university PR departments do. A lot of crappy science journalism gets its start with a boiled-down press release that proclaims that the university's researchers have released a study proving some fact when the study in truth doesn't say much of anything conclusive.

For example, look at the story that was recently on Slashdot about HFCS causing obesity in rats. Several respectable science journalists have taken the time to look at the study more closely and concluded that it was deeply flawed and didn't prove much of anything. (1 2 3)

So where did the wide-eyed, "Big News!" take on the study come from? Why from Princeton's press release. This sort of things happens all the time in headline-grabbing areas of science, like global warming, nutrition, anthropology / humanoid evolution, cosmology, etc. Universities know that donations and grants come to those institutions that make the biggest splash, and they are more than willing to trump up the importance of a study that isn't as powerful as the headlines might make it out to be. Just like all those massive industry campaigns you decry as so different, lazy newspapers pick up the PR piece and publish it almost verbatim as news.

The problem of self-promoting PR compounded by a lack of journalistic integrity and diligence is just as prevalent in science as in industry. You want to know where the whole "eggs are good for you, eggs are bad for you" debate comes from? It comes from press releases overstating the importance of a particular study before it's faced years of peer review and double-checking. And this sort of irresponsible bragging is a large part of why the public is so skeptical about science actually knowing anything.

I would like to endorse the sentiment expressed by Ars and expand upon it. Since I have access to most scientific journals, a couple days ago when this study was first published, but before any secondary analysis appeared on the web, I printed it out and took it home to read. I read scientific papers all the time (usually physics and chemistry), probably hundreds of papers per year, so I like to think that I'm pretty familiar with how good science is done and what constitutes a well designed, rigorously conducted investigation.

The impression I got while reading this paper, is that it is a total piece of crap. It is confusingly written to begin with, but there are serious problems with methodology, controls, conclusions, assumptions about caloric intake and claimed statistical significance. It's a joke. Which, I guess is why it's published in an obscure journal with a pathetic 2.7 impact factor. Two sites explaining the problems in more detail are the Skeptic's Guide to the Universe forums at: http://sguforums.com/index.php/topic,26925.15.html and this blog post by Marion Nestle (a New York University professor in the department of nutrition, food studies, and public health with a Ph.D. in molecular biology): http://www.foodpolitics.com/2010/03/hfcs-makes-rats-fat/

None of this told me how Princeton, of all places, could publish such a shit study though.....until I noticed this at the top of the paper that all the authors are from the Uni's PSYCHOLOGY department. Oh, I guess that's how.