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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.
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.
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...
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.
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.