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The U.S. Department of Agriculture is promoting a giant full-body exhibit for kids to walk through to promote healthy eating habits.While encouraging schools to apply for nearly $6 million in grants to help them comply with the First Lady Michelle Obama-promoted Healthy Hunger-Free Kids Act new lunch standards, the USDA highlighted efforts by the Kansas State Department of Education.“Body Venture, a traveling health education exhibit sponsored by Kansas State Department of Education travels to schools to teach students about nutrition and physical activity,” the USDA said in a blog post Friday.Body Venture is a 45-foot by 50-foot exhibit that starts...

Guess What Makes The Cut As A 'Smart Snack' In Schools? Hot Cheetos Flamin' Hot Cheetos might conjure a lot of descriptors: spicy, crunchy, unnaturally fiery red. But it's a good bet that "healthy" didn't exactly spring to mind. Yet it turns out that those fiery Cheetos beloved by school children (some kids even made an epic rap paean to Hot Cheetos a few years ago) actually qualify as a "Smart Snack" under revised federal nutrition guidelines for schools. The Obama administration rolled out the new guidelines last year in a bid to limit the amount of junk food kids...

A new report says that the federal government plans to keep track of how healthy children are by weighing and measuring them in daycare. The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) will weigh and check the height of roughly 3,000 children as part of a study mandated by First Lady Michelle Obama’s Healthy Hunger-Free Kids Act. According to a report by Free Beacon, the USDA published “a notice in the Federal Register on Friday proposing data collection on what meals are served in professional and home daycare facilities and how much physical activity children perform.” …

The meat industry is seeing red. Meat companies have tried to rehabilitate an image tarnished in recent years by health and environmental concerns. Now the industry is swiftly and aggressively working to discredit a proposal for new dietary guidelines that recommends people eat less red and processed meat. The proposal last month by a government advisory committee also relegates the health benefits of lean meat to a footnote to the main recommendations. “We’ve been put in a position over the years to almost be apologizing for our product; we’re not going to do that anymore,” said Barry Carpenter, the president...

Sen. John Hoeven (R-N.D.) is introducing legislation to relax the rules for healthy school lunches. At the School Nutrition Association’s (SNA) 2015 Legislative Action Conference at the JW Marriott Monday, Hoeven announced the Healthy School Meals Flexibility Act to give schools more flexibility in complying with the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) regulations when it comes to whole grains and sodium levels. The bill would allow schools to revert back to 2012 standards, which require at least half of all grains served in school breakfast and school lunch to be whole grain rich. The standard now is for 100 percent...

Stop chugging sugary soda and munching sweet treats. Cut back on red meats, butter and other sources of saturated fat. Lay off the salt shaker. Eat plenty of fruits and veggies. And don't worry about having an egg and an extra cup of coffee with your breakfast. These are the conclusions of the advisory panel that helps shape America's official dietary guidelines, and they appear to be about the same as they were back in 2010, the last time the guidelines were updated, dietitians say. "What's good about the report is that much of it is reinforcing what we saw...

A state-level bureaucrat is standing up to the the central government planners is a most unusual way. Arizona’s superintendent of public instruction, Diane Douglas, has informed all school districts in the Grand Canyon State that they have blanket authority to ignore all federal nutrition mandates regulating school fundraisers. "Forcing parents and other supporters of schools to only offer federally approved food and snacks at fundraisers is a perfect example of the overreach of government and intrusion into local control," Douglas said in a statement. "I have ordered effective immediately, that the ADE Health and Nutrition Services division grant exemptions for...

President Barack Obama wants to create a new government agency dedicated to keeping the nation’s food safe. The proposal in the president’s budget released Monday comes after outbreaks of illnesses linked to chicken, eggs, peanuts and cantaloupe in recent years. More than a dozen federal agencies oversee food safety, and consumer advocates have long called for bringing all those functions together in a single home. […] The budget proposes consolidating the Agriculture Department’s Food Safety and Inspection Service and all of FDA’s food safety oversight into one new agency within the Department of Health and Human Services. The new agency...

Empty chicken nuggets, ‘thimble-sized’ portions, rotten fruitDesperate students are still taking to Twitter to reveal the horrors of school lunch under First Lady Michelle Obama’s rules, including empty chicken nuggets and complaints that meals taste like “prison food.” While the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) raves about “locally sourced chicken sandwiches” that meet nutrition standards served in a school district in South Carolina, students across the country complain about what they are eating under the new rules. “My poor little sister has to eat prison food #ThanksMichelleObama,” one student tweeted on Friday. Students are unhappy about their “chickpea sliders” and...

The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) is proposing strict new dietary guidelines for day cares that would prohibit them from frying food that is served to children.Child care providers would also be formally required to provide children with water upon request, though they would face restrictions on how much apple juice and orange juice they serve.The proposed nutrition standards are intended to promote the "health and wellness of children" at day cares that participate in government-funded meal programs, the USDA's Food and Nutrition Service said Wednesday.One of the more notable provisions would restrict day cares from frying food on site...

It’s a morning Kenneth Wright will never forget: 15 armed agents break in his front door and grab him by the neck, still in the boxer shorts he slept in. For six hours, a handcuffed Wright sat in a cruiser parked outside with his three children, ages 3, 7, and 11, while agents searched his house. “They put me in handcuffs in that hot patrol car for six hours, traumatizing my kids,” the Stockton, Calif., resident told a local news outlet at the time. Drugs? Weapons? Domestic violence? No. As Wright later found out, his gun-toting visitors were from the...

The U.S. Department of Agriculture has issued an order that millions of Americans will likely find impossible to carry out: stop eating raw cookie dough. “Avoid raw or partially cooked eggs or foods containing raw eggs, such as cookie dough,” USDA advised in an email over the weekend. cookie1 Carrying out that simple 15-word recommendation would radically change millions of lives, from families who routinely bake cookies and invite the kids to scoop batter out of the bowl, to people who scarf down pre-packaged cookie dough, to everyone who eats cookie dough found in ice cream. Simply put, it’s not...

The number of beneficiaries who receive compensation from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), otherwise known as food stamps, has topped 46,000,000 for 37 straight months, according to data released by the Department of Agriculture (USDA). In September 2014, which is the latest data from the USDA, there were 46,459,998 Americans who received assistance from the SNAP program. The number of beneficiaries has exceeded 46 million since September 2011, a total of 37 months, or more than three years. [snip]Households on food stamps in September got an average of $252.69 during the month, and the program benefits cost taxpayers $5,748,809,023....

More than half of the nation’s school cafeteria workers expect to lose money selling low-salt, low-fat meals pushed by first lady Michelle Obama, a “serious” problem that threatens the programs, according to a survey of food providers.The School Nutrition Association, which is planning to demand changes to the meal requirements to make the food more attractive to students, found that 50.35 percent of cafeteria officials surveyed expect that serving the food will “exceed revenue” next year.“Of the 92 percent of respondents reporting that rising costs pose a ‘serious’ or ‘moderate’ challenge to their programs, 70 percent indicated ‘serious,’” said the...

USDA Buys Cranberries For Food Pantries And School Lunches: ‘It’s A Win-Win’ Nov 27, 2014 06:24 PM EST USDA Cranberries - The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) agreed to purchase up to $55 million in cranberry products to the Congressional Cranberry Caucus.The USDA doubled with this buy the previous one, which was in January. The agreement ended up with the Agriculture Dept. getting 68 million pounds of surplus cranberries, Green Bay Press Gazette reported.The U.S. Sen. Tammy Baldwin said on a press release on Monday that Wisconsin is the main producer of cranberries and the decision of the USDA is to...

Gov. Paul LePage’s administration is facing a potential loss of federal funding to administer its food stamp program over concerns about state’s decision to put photos on cards used to access the benefits. Federal officials said in a letter to the Maine Department of Health and Human Services on Thursday that recipients are being given information that makes it seem like they’re required to have their photos placed electronic benefit transfer cards, even though the program is voluntary. The Republican governor’s administration must make it clear to recipients that their decision to not have their photo placed on the card...

The U.S. Department of Agriculture has approved Idaho-based J.R. Simplot Co.'s new genetically modified potato. But one of the company's oldest business partners — McDonald's — hasn't. The fast-food giant says it doesn't use genetically modified potatoes, the Idaho Statesman reported. "McDonald's USA does not source GMO potatoes, nor do we have current plans to change our sourcing practices," the company said in a statement.

Many parents prefer to send their children off to school with a packed lunch, believing that the food they have given them is far healthier than school lunches. But a new study, published in the Journal of Nutrition Education and Behavior, claims this may not be the case. The research team, led by Alisha R. Farris of the Department of Human Nutrition, Food and Exercise at Virginia Tech, found that school lunches had better average nutritional quality than packed lunches. "We found that both packed and school lunches almost entirely met nutrition standards, except school lunches were below energy and...

A virus that killed millions of baby pigs in the last year and led to higher pork prices has waned thanks to warmer weather and farmers’ efforts to sterilize their operations. And as pigs’ numbers increase, sticker shock on things like bacon should ease. Already, hog supplies are on the rise, with 5.46 million baby pigs born between June and August in Iowa, the nation’s leading producer—the highest quarterly total in 20 years and a record 10.7 surviving pigs per litter, according to a U.S. Department of Agriculture report. It’s a significant turnaround from a year ago when the porcine...

Enormous amounts of taxpayer dollars keep pouring into a scandalous Obama administration program that aims to provide low-income minorities—already getting free groceries from the government—with healthier foods. It’s part of the First Lady’s effort to eradicate “food deserts,” area’s with limited access to affordable and nutritious foods, and so far the administration has spent a fortune with no end in sight to the cash flow. Announced just a few weeks ago, the latest allocation is for $31.5 million to “create projects that increase the purchase of fruits and vegetables among low-income consumers” that already get food stamps from American taxpayers....