Slashdot Mirror
Trump Administration Rolls Back Obama-Era Nutrition Standards For School Lunches (arstechnica.com)
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.
In the spirit of Saint Reagan
http://saveie6.com/
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
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.
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.
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
>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.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
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.
Om, nomnomnom...
You do realize that all milk is skim, right? They skim it, then pasteurize it, then homogenized the cream, then add it back in. So "whole" milk is skim milk with added chemically treated fat that doesn't float to the top.
There's no more "water" in skim than whole. I like unhomogenized whole milk, but the greasy texture of homogenized whole milk is disgusting. So I drink skim, because it's the only non-homogenized milk that's widely available here now.
Learn to love Alaska
Uhm, no. Skim "milk" is made by separation, "whole" milk undergoes filtering but no separation. Here's 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...
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
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.
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.
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.
I started a Keto diet in April. Lost ~25 lbs in a month, but I'm really fat. The thing about the diet is you can still buy processed stuff as long as it isn't high in carbs or sugar. So dips, cheeses, meats, etc are still on the table. It is pretty easy to stick with, lots of salads with meats and you can have most dressings. Cutting carbs and sugars has really improved the way I feel and my poops.
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" -- 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.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.