Another NANNY STATE FAIL, retreat on "healthy" School Lunches

Food waste also is a problem, Brown said. Students take the food they are required to put on their cafeteria tray, but they don’t have to eat it. “Although none of the districts we visited had fully analyzed food waste over the past few years to determine if it changed during school year 2012-2013, six of the SFAs we visited told us they believe food waste has increased because of the new lunch requirements."

Brown noted that student participation in the school lunch program decreased in the 2012-2013 school year – another indication that students don’t like the changes. “Most of the SFAs we visited reported that they experienced decreases in lunch participation in school year 2012-2013 in part because of the new lunch requirements,” Brown said.

- See more at: http://cnsnews.com/news/article/where-s-my-pbj-menu-changes-are-driving-children-out-lunch-line#sthash.EF17CN64.dpuf

She plays on the high school sports teams so she needs the calories. Right after school,

An increasingly cozy alliance between companies that manufacture processed foods and companies that serve the meals is making students — a captive market — fat and sick while pulling in hundreds of millions of dollars in profits. At a time of fiscal austerity, these companies are seducing school administrators with promises to cut costs through privatization. Parents who want healthier meals, meanwhile, are outgunned.

Each day, 32 million children in the United States get lunch at schools that participate in the National School Lunch Program, which uses agricultural surplus to feed children. About 21 million of these students eat free or reduced-price meals, a number that has surged since the recession. The program, which also provides breakfast, costs $13.3 billion a year.

Sadly, it is being mismanaged and exploited. About a quarter of the school nutrition program has been privatized, much of it outsourced to food service management giants like Aramark, based in Philadelphia; Sodexo, based in France; and the Chartwells division of the Compass Group, based in Britain. They work in tandem with food manufacturers like the chicken producers Tyson and Pilgrim’s, all of which profit when good food is turned to bad.

Here’s one way it works. The Agriculture Department pays about $1 billion a year for commodities like fresh apples and sweet potatoes, chickens and turkeys. Schools get the food free; some cook it on site, but more and more pay processors to turn these healthy ingredients into fried chicken nuggets, fruit pastries, pizza and the like. Some $445 million worth of commodities are sent for processing each year, a nearly 50 percent increase since 2006.

The Agriculture Department doesn’t track spending to process the food, but school authorities do. The Michigan Department of Education, for example, gets free raw chicken worth $11.40 a case and sends it for processing into nuggets at $33.45 a case. The schools in San Bernardino, Calif., spend $14.75 to make French fries out of $5.95 worth of potatoes.

I think they need to put real kitchens and real cooks back in schools

In fiscal year 2012, the federal government provided funding for more than five billion lunches served to more than 31 million schoolchildren at a total cost of $16 billion.

Crazy. We've sent our kids to school with lunch in hand their entire lives. I would never rely on a public school to feed my children.

The milk thing pisses me off more than anything....kids especially NEED the milk fat, as recent science shows.

Another study in the Archives of Disease in Childhood in March echoed the JAMA study and showed that children who drank lower-fat milk were more likely to be overweight later in life.

"Our original hypothesis was that children who drank high-fat milk, either whole milk or 2 percent would be heavier because they were consuming more saturated fat calories," author Dr. Mark Daniel DeBoer, an associate professor of pediatric endocrinology at the University of Virginia School of Medicine and the chair-elect for the AAP Committee on Nutrition, explained to TIME. "We were really surprised when we looked at the data and it was very clear that within every ethnicity and every socioeconomic strata, that it was actually the opposite, that children who drank skim milk and 1 percent were heavier than those who drank 2 percent and whole."

There’s been controversy brewing over the past decade about just how bad saturated fat is for health. Fueling the debate, in part, has been the resurgence of the Atkins Diet, which eschews carbs but allows liberal use of high-fat foods, including foods high in saturated fat—butter, bacon, steak, cheese, and the like. (20) More recently, several studies seemed to suggest that eating diets high in saturated fat did not raise the risk of heart disease—a finding that ran counter to decades of dietary advice. (21,22) One highly-publicized report analyzed the findings of 21 studies that followed 350,000 people for up to 23 years. Investigators looked at the relationship between saturated fat intake and coronary heart disease (CHD), stroke, and cardiovascular disease (CVD). Their controversial conclusion: “There is insufficient evidence from prospective epidemiologic studies to conclude that dietary saturated fat is associated with an increased risk of CHD, stroke, or CVD.”(21)

With headlines like “Saturated Fat is Not Your Heart’s Enemy,” and “NOT GUILTY: The Long-Standing Vilification of Saturated Fat Finally Turning to Vindication,”(23,24) some of the media and blog coverage of these studies would have you believe that scientists had given a green light to eating bacon, butter, and cheese. But that’s an oversimplified and erroneous interpretation. Read the study and subsequent studies more closely, and the message is more nuanced: Cutting back on saturated fat can be good for health if people replace saturated fat with good fats, especially, polyunsaturated fats. (16,25) Eating good fats in place of saturated fat lowers the “bad” LDL cholesterol, and it improves the ratio of total cholesterol to “good” HDL cholesterol, lowering the risk of heart disease. Eating good fats in place of saturated fat can also help prevent insulin resistance, a precursor to diabetes. (26)

Cutting back on saturated fat will likely have no benefit, however, if people replace saturated fat with refined carbohydrates—white bread, white rice, mashed potatoes, sugary drinks, and the like. Eating refined carbs in place of saturated fat does lower “bad” LDL cholesterol—but it also lowers the “good” HDL cholesterol and increases triglycerides.The net effect is as bad for the heart as eating too much saturated fat—and perhaps even worse for people who have insulin resistance because they are overweight or inactive. (17,25)