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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.
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.
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.
"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.
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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.
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.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
By that logic, why do we teach kids things they don't want to learn? Why not just teach them Snapchat?
I don't respond to AC's.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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> 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.
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.