Posted on 04/15/2013 8:13:06 PM PDT by Tolerance Sucks Rocks
Republican Reps. Steve King of Iowa and Tim Huelskamp of Kansas continued their fight against the Agriculture Department’s recent public school meal regulation overhaul on Friday.
The congressmen have argued that the new regulations imposed by the USDA, as required by the Michelle Obama-backed Healthy and Hunger Free Kids Act, are overly restrictive for growing and active children, largely due to calorie caps on meals.
“The voluminous menu that’s good enough for the federal bureaucrats’ cafeteria should be good enough for our children’s school lunchroom,” Huelskamp said in a statement Friday. “If USDA Secretary Tom Vilsack thinks the federal government should dictate what local governments put on their school lunchroom menus, why isn’t he leading by example? Secretary Vilsack should impose his ‘Nutrition Nanny’ standards on the USDA buildings’ cafeteria menus before the USDA seizes control of lunchroom menus in 100,000 school districts.”
(Excerpt) Read more at dailycaller.com ...
Nanny State PING!
The idea that a linebacker like Michelle would try to tell me what my kids can eat is infuriating.
I was an underweight child. What about the kids like me?
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The problem isn’t the limit on calories, it’s the limit on fat.
Feeding kids that many carbs is guaranteed to make most of them grow up sick and obese.
I totally disagree. The problem is the federal government in the schools, let alone their cafeterias, to begin with.
Then their are the households where kids spend too much time on their own because both parents work---or there is only one parent in the home and he/she works. The kids do whatever they want.
Our country's in trouble and it's not only the obesity.
The states have never delegated to Congress via the Constitution the specific powers to regulate either intrastate agriculure or public schools.
If you want healthy kids, get them out of government schools!
My first grader son came home a few weeks ago, hungry and exasperated. He said that the school lunches weren’t good any more and asked us to pack his lunch for now on, and we have.
The problem is the federal government in the schools, let alone their cafeterias, to begin with.
In large part, I agree with you. And if was handled locally, we could be certain that at least in some parts of the country our schools wouldn't be poisoning our kids.
But as long as the Department of Agriculture is publishing "dietary guidelines" that are primarily written by people on the payroll of the grain and edible oil industries, it doesn't much matter whether it's the federal government or a local school board mandating they they be followed.
Until they “disallow” that because “it’s not fair” that your kid gets to eat “unhealthy” food while the rest eat the provided lunches.
The USDA shouldn't be issuing "dietary guidelines" for anything other than crops and livestock - not humans, and especially not school children - because the federal government has no business involved in K-12 education - period.
The Japanese consume a diet high in carbohydrates, but I don't see them, or their children, growing up sick and obese. As a matter of fact, some of those high carb consuming populations enjoy the highest life expectancy of any people on earth.
Why is this a Federal level issue anyway? Shouldn’t it be left to the states, and the school boards?
The USDA shouldn't be issuing "dietary guidelines" for anything other than crops and livestock
Well, my first response is that dietary guidelines are a health matter, and should be issued by Health and Human Services, rather than by the Department of Agriculture.
But my second response is that there shouldn't be a Department of Health and Human Services.
And then my third response is that there shouldn't be a Department of Agriculture, either.
The way I see it, we need State, Treasury, Defense, Justice, and Interior. And maybe Commerce. The rest we'd be better off without.
You will get n argument from me on that suggestion!
The Japanese consume a diet high in carbohydrates, but I don't see them, or their children, growing up sick and obese.
There have been cultures that traditionally ate high-carb diets, without becoming obese. These traditionally ate grains and beans, rather than flour and sugar, and usually fermented them.
It's flour and sugar that are the problem, and I'll challenge you to find a single example of a culture that survives predominantly on refined carbs that isn't sick and obese - and often malnourished at the same time.
As for Japan, their obesity rates have been skyrocketing, as they've adopted western foods:
Obesity on the rise as Japanese eat more Western-style food
Of course, their kids are getting a better start, because their school lunches actually serve food, and insist that they eat it. (As opposed to ours, which consider sugar-and-chocolate flavored milk to be healthy, so long as it is low-fat.):
How Japan’s revolutionary school lunches helped slow the rise of child obesity
Thanks for the ping!
A few generations ago, we were a country with little obesity. That's because we employed a lot of people in agriculture, but mostly because people worked like hell and didn't sit on their butts. The diet consumed on the average farm was high in carbohydrates, many of them highly refined (flour, sugar, corn syrup, etc.), yet obesity was almost nonexistent, and the people could hardly be considered sick working 12+ hours a day.
Japan has always had a high carb diet, and some of those foods are most certainly considered to be high glycemic. The GI of rice is all over the board, with the average being around 65. This is higher than heavily processed high fructose corn syrup which has a GI in the 55~60 range.
People who want to sell diet books and the latest diet fad have seen the benefits of demonizing one macronutrient over another. But that's good for selling books and such, but does nothing for those who are genuinely interested in the cause(s) of obesity. Like it has been since the beginning, obesity, at least for the vast majority of people, is caused by people consuming more energy than they burn.
Lowfat milk in our schools is just plain stupid, but there it is. The fact that they include some flavoring to make it palatable shouldn't bother anyone who is truly interested in proper child nutrition. Milk casein, next to egg albumin, is probably the highest quality protein we consume. And growing children need a lot of high quality protein. Without that flavoring, the lowfat milk, along with all the nutrition, ends up in the garbage.
I spent a lot of time in Japan in the 80's and 90's, and it is pretty obvious that, like us, many of them have adopted a sedentary lifestyle and are now reaping the consequences of a slothful existence. But it wasn't always that way, and the Japanese can hardly be considered an obese or unhealthy society today. That just isn't true. This issue is, and always has been, about total calories consumed vs. calories burned. Same as it ever was.
Well now, that would be pro-liberty, and the Federal government simply cannot have that rot!
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