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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.
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.
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. 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 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 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.
In other words, schools are now allowed to serve stuff that kids will actually eat again, making afternoon class teachers and any student with afterschool activities happy again.
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2014/mar/6/1m-kids-stop-school-lunch-due-michelle-obamas-stan/
The unwritten tidbit here was the lunches became so bland and boring that kids stopped eating them and instead either didn't eat or brought in food. This isn't good because school lunches come from farming subsidizes and under utilized school lunch programs in low income areas mean kids aren't eating. The real solution to this is more physical education (with physical exertion).
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.
Caution: Contents under pressure
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.
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.
B) Eliminate all the stupid users. This is frowned upon by society.
when you're hungry enough everything tastes good. This is mostly about cost. The healthier options cost more. This lets them cut the program and pocket the difference somewhere else. The people who did this are not good people. Don't kid yourself.
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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.
I'm Aussie and I think the culture is different compared to the states, but when I went to school virtually everyone brought their own packed lunch from home.
Me and a number of my friends were given money by our parents to buy our lunches from the school canteen once a week, usually on shopping day when we had not much food left in the house.
Does anyone in the US send their children to school with packed lunches, or is it something of a social stigma to do so?
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?
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?
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Back when I was a kid, schools were teaching, not feeding.
And I had PB&J sandwiches, a lot! And I liked it!
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
Local population are for spanking and corporal punishment, which we know is counterproductive through studies. Local population are "local" and thus in lower numbers and don't have the power to do a lot of studies, and thus can have hit and miss. In this precise case, I am pretty sure "low fat" is stupid, but this has nothing to do with the "state vs federal". De genere, the feds will have more power for studies and will in average know better than the state.
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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.
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.
> 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.
This could be actually a good thing, but for their unintended consequences.
After the publication in 1980 of USDA dietary guidelines 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
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 for the sake of corporate profits when they should be using that time to fix the poisoned water problem in Flint Michigan which is only set to get worse now that the EPA is being run by a neo-liberal sociopath/moron hybrid who thinks having something like the EPA to keep an eye on things like poisoned water is a waste of taxpayer money because it interferes with his ability to boost his profit margin by dumping poison in the water supply and feeding school kids substandard food.
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.
And as soon as you can FORCE kids to eat it, you actually have a point.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
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 ?
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.
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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.
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.
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?
Dear mods, you may disagree, but this is certainly not trolling. For shame.
Better to let schools determine their own standards and not be shackled into serving something that won't be eaten.
That way, public schools are free to make the balance between nutrition and what will be eaten - versus forcing something on people that the prior regime's family would never eat themselves.
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