January 28, 2012, Christina Hoag, AP, San Jose Mercury News

Students at Roosevelt High School have declared a food fight to win back peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.

Fed up with new, healthy cafeteria cuisine that features dishes like ancho chili chicken with yakosoba edamame and tortellini with butternut squash, they’re petitioning the school district to return old favorites like PB&J and calzones to the lunch lineup.

“We, the students of Roosevelt High School, would like to be served food that we can enjoy eating, rather than the ‘healthier’ food that we just throw away,” states the petition being circulated at the 3,200-student school located in a low income neighborhood just east of downtown Los Angeles.

School districts across the nation, including Los Angeles Unified, are revamping lunch trays to meet tighter federal nutrition standards designed to stem obesity, which affects about a third of children nationally. The U.S. Department of Agriculture this week announced new guidelines calling for milk to be skim or low-fat, grains to be whole, and double the amount of fruit and vegetables.

But as many parents can attest, getting kids to try new foods, especially ones that are good for them, can be a battle of wits and wills. Little kids tend to be less finicky than big kids, who look for that elusive factor of “coolness” in everything from fashion to French fries.

“Essentially, you’re competing with McDonald’s,” said Susan Levin, director of nutrition education for the
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Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, who works with school districts on their menus. “But it can be done.”

The emphasis on nutrition is a major swing from the 1990s when some schools featured brand-name fast-food burgers and pizza for lunch and sold potato chips, cookies and sodas in vending machines.
With national attention turning to climbing rates of childhood diabetes and other weight-related ailments, many districts have now outlawed everything from trans fats to deep-frying. Some have even dispensed with chocolate milk because of the added sugar.

But districts have found that getting kids to change eating habits isn’t easy, and involves both smarter menus and a dollop of marketing.

The Los Angeles Unified School District, which serves 650,000 meals a day, saw school lunch participation plunge by some 12 percent after unveiling the new dishes. Kids have gradually come around—participation is now down by only 5 percent as compared to last year.

Chicago Public Schools saw a 5 percent drop when it did a menu makeover last year.

High school students have some of the toughest palates to please.
READ MORE via LA schools struggle to make healthy meals popular – San Jose Mercury News.

January 28, 2012, Brittany Givens, Seascoastonline.com

U.S. Department of Agriculture Under Secretary Kevin W. Concannon said school lunch programs should be providing children with more fruits and vegetables.

“We have a serious problem of obesity in the country,” Concannon told a group of local nutrition and health services professionals Friday. “We really need to focus on activity and healthy foods.”

Concannon was the featured speaker in a roundtable discussion at Community Campus. The event was attended by representatives from programs such as St. Vincent’s, Southern New Hampshire Services and the University of New Hampshire Cooperative Extension. Participants discussed ways in which schools could improve lunches and how the USDA has been able to help people in tough economical times.

This week, 101,000 schools across the country celebrated a nutrition week by improving the dietary value of school lunch programs.

Concannon discussed ways that the USDA plans to take these efforts further and shared reasons for the program’s success. He said that one of the USDA’s major goals is to improve the diets of Americans from birth.

Representatives from local nutrition organizations voiced concerns over the current situation in schools. Many were concerned with the lack of fresh fruits and vegetables in schools and wanted to see less canned foods and sugar.

Other concerns included a need for more storage space for fruits and vegetables, as well as easier and cheaper ways to provide milk and meat.

Concannon also spoke about USDA’s efforts to help those who cannot afford to eat healthy.

“We’re living through a … tough time in the economy,” Concannon said. “I’ve been to food banks and pantries and I always hear, ‘I never thought I’d be here.’”

The USDA’s Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program has helped 46 million people, Concannon said.

via USDA official stresses need for nutrition in school food | SeacoastOnline.com.

January 25, 2012, Houston Chronicle

School lunches, long saddled with an unhealthy reputation, are getting a makeover.Instead of salt-doused fried foods, highly processed white bread and sugar-laden desserts, cafeteria trays will be carrying whole wheat pizza, leafy green and orange vegetables and fresh fruit.The changes, announced Wednesday by first lady Michelle Obama and Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, mark the first major nutritional adjustment to the $11 billion school meal program in 15 years.

Under the new guidelines, which were directed by the 2010 Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act, schools must limit calories, trans fat and sodium, while serving students a wider variety of fruit, vegetables and whole grains.The nutritional overhaul reflects both a societal shift toward a more health-conscious diet and a growing concern about childhood obesity, which affects 17 percent of the countrys children.”When we send our kids to school, we expect that they wont be eating the kind of fatty, salty, sugary foods that we try to keep them from eating at home,” Obama said in a statement.The updated regulations were first proposed a year ago, giving school districts the opportunity to make comments and revamp their menus.

After opposition by potato growers and food companies, Congress blocked proposed changes that would have limited starchy vegetables to two servings a week and required pizza makers to increase the amount of tomato paste to qualify as a vegetable serving.

Local districts effortsThe new rules, which will affect 32 million children, will be phased in over the next three years.Many Houston-area school districts have already taken steps to raise nutritional standards, instituting changes that mirror many of the new USDA requirements.

Read more via School lunches get a healthy makeover – Houston Chronicle.

Feeding preschoolers smaller portions of the main dish at lunchtime means they’ll eat more fruit and vegetables on the side and fewer total calories, according to a new study.

Researchers said the finding may give parents one extra strategy to encourage youngsters to eat more greens, as childhood obesity rates continue rising and research suggests that kids lag well behind guidelines for fruit and veggie consumption.

With main courses, “you need to be careful and use the age-appropriate serving,” said Sara Sweitzer, a nutrition researcher from the University of Texas at Austin.

“If they fill up on the entree, obviously the fruit and the vegetable are the last to get eaten,” added Sweitzer, who wasn’t involved in the new study.

Parents can make sure they’re providing the right amount of food both by inspecting what’s left in the lunch box when kids come home, and by talking to their kids about how much they eat.

“Go ahead and ask your child, ‘Do you want a whole sandwich or do you want just half a sandwich?’” she advised.

READ MORE VIA: Smaller servings mean more balanced meals for kids: study – chicagotribune.com.

January 9, 2012, Blisstree.com, Deborah Dunham

As the battle to point the finger at someone for our nation’s childhood obesity epidemic continues, one top New York City Department of Health official now says that the free breakfast program in city schools is to blame. It’s what she says is causing poor kids to get fat, but in reality, she couldn’t be more wrong–or more insensitive.

Director of Community Epidemiology, Gretchen Van Wye said the in-class meals that these students receive each morning at certain urban schools is resulting in over 21% of the underprivileged kids eating two breakfasts.

According to a recent study that analyzed the free breakfast program for 2,289 third-, fourth- and fifth-graders in East and Central Harlem, North and Central Brooklyn, and the South Bronx, researchers compared kids who ate the free breakfasts and and found that about one in five were eating breakfast twice. When presenting these findings to her agency co-workers, Van Wye stated:

Special care should be taken to ensure that children are not inadvertently taking in excess calories by eating in multiple locations.

But in direct opposition to that, another health official told the New York Post:

We’d rather have kids be hungry than fat? Horrible! The evidence is so shaky. And the implications are terrible—kids going hungry.

While they both make valid points, it seems like they’re missing the main culprit of childhood obesity, which is the type of food, not necessarily the quantity.

The in-class breakfasts at these city schools are said to feature “tempting treats” such as cream cheese and bagels, string cheese and apple loaf. And, based on what people like Jamie Oliver have revealed in the past, we all know the unhealthy foods probably don’t stop there. Yes, the federal guidelines mandate that the meals be roughly 450 calories, but 450 calories of what? Because a breakfast with 450 calories of fresh fruit, low-sugar cereal and skim milk would likely not contribute to childhood obesity, even if a student ate it twice a day.

Instead of arguing about this and possibly putting a much-needed program in jeopardy, the health officials need to pay more attention to the quality of food served, versus the quantity these underprivileged kids are eating. After all, if they come from poor homes where food is lacking, how can anyone deny them a healthy breakfast? Or two?

via Not Solving Childhood Obesity: Health Officials Say Free School Breakfast Makes Poor Kids Fat.

Via Yahoo News, AP, Mary Clare Jalonick

Who needs leafy greens and carrots when pizza and french fries will do?

In an effort many 9-year-olds will cheer, Congress wants pizza and french fries to stay on school lunch lines and is fighting the Obama administration’s efforts to take unhealthy foods out of schools.
The final version of a spending bill released late Monday would unravel school lunch standards the Agriculture Department proposed earlier this year. These include limiting the use of potatoes on the lunch line, putting new restrictions on sodium and boosting the use of whole grains. The legislation would block or delay all of those efforts.

The bill also would allow tomato paste on pizzas to be counted as a vegetable, as it is now. USDA had wanted to only count a half-cup of tomato paste or more as a vegetable, and a serving of pizza has less than that.

Nutritionists say the whole effort is reminiscent of the Reagan administration’s much-ridiculed attempt 30 years ago to classify ketchup as a vegetable to cut costs. This time around, food companies that produce frozen pizzas for schools, the salt industry and potato growers requested the changes and lobbied Congress.

School meals that are subsidized by the federal government must include a certain amount of vegetables, and USDA’s proposal could have pushed pizza-makers and potato growers out of the school lunch business.

Piling on to the companies’ opposition, some conservatives argue that the federal government shouldn’t tell children what to eat. In a summary of the bill, Republicans on the House Appropriations Committee said the changes would “prevent overly burdensome and costly regulations and …provide greater flexibility for local school districts to improve the nutritional quality of meals.”

School districts have said some of the USDA proposals go too far and cost too much when budgets are extremely tight. Schools have long taken broad instructions from the government on what they can serve in the federally subsidized meals that are given free or at reduced price to low-income children. But some schools have balked at government attempts to tell them exactly what foods they can’t serve.

Reacting to that criticism, House Republicans had urged USDA to rewrite the standards in a bill passed in June. The Senate last month voted to block the potato limits in its version, with opposition to the restrictions led by potato-growing states. Neither version of the bill included the latest provisions on tomato paste, sodium or whole grains; House and Senate negotiators added those in the last two weeks as they put finishing touches on the legislation.

The school lunch proposal is based on 2009 recommendations by the Institute of Medicine, the health arm of the National Academy of Sciences. Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack said they are necessary to reduce childhood obesity and future health care costs.
USDA spokeswoman Courtney Rowe said Tuesday that the department will continue its efforts to make lunches healthier.
“While it’s unfortunate that some members of Congress continue to put special interests ahead of the health of America’s children, USDA remains committed to practical, science-based standards for school meals,” she said in a statement.

Nutrition advocate Margo Wootan of the Center for Science in the Public Interest said Congress’s proposed changes will keep schools from serving a wider array of vegetables. Children already get enough pizza and potatoes, she says. It also would slow efforts to make pizzas — a longtime standby on school lunch lines — healthier, with whole grain crusts and lower sodium levels.

“They are making sure that two of the biggest problems in the school lunch program, pizza and french fries, are untouched,” she said.
A group of retired generals advocating for healthier school lunches also criticized the spending bill. The group, called Mission: Readiness, has called poor nutrition in school lunches a national security issue because obesity is the leading medical disqualifier for military service.

“We are outraged that Congress is seriously considering language that would effectively categorize pizza as a vegetable in the school lunch program,” Amy Dawson Taggart, the director of the group, said in a letter to lawmakers before the final bill was released. “It doesn’t take an advanced degree in nutrition to call this a national disgrace.”
Specifically, the bill would:

• Block the Agriculture Department from limiting starchy vegetables, including corn and peas, to two servings a week. The rule was intended to cut down on french fries, which many schools serve daily.
• Allow USDA to count two tablespoons of tomato paste as a vegetable, as it does now. The department had attempted to require that only a half-cup of tomato paste could be considered a vegetable. Federally subsidized lunches must have a certain number of vegetables to be served.
• Require further study on long-term sodium reduction requirements set forth by the USDA guidelines.
• Require USDA to define “whole grains” before they regulate them. The USDA rules require schools to use more whole grains.

Food companies who have fought the USDA standards say they were too strict and neglected the nutrients that potatoes, other starchy vegetables and tomato paste do offer.

“This agreement ensures that nutrient-rich vegetables such as potatoes, corn and peas will remain part of a balanced, healthy diet in federally funded school meals and recognizes the significant amounts of potassium, fiber and vitamins A and C provided by tomato paste, ensuring that students may continue to enjoy healthy meals such as pizza and pasta,” said Kraig Naasz, president of the American Frozen Food Institute.

The school lunch provisions are part of a final House-Senate compromise on a $182 billion measure that would fund the day-to-day operations of the departments of Agriculture, Commerce, Justice, Transportation and Housing and Urban Development. Both the House and the Senate are expected to vote on the bill this week and send it to President Barack Obama.

Congress pushes back on healthier school lunches – Yahoo! News.

Typical school lunch

Huffington Post, Maria Rodale, August 25, 2011

Our children’s health and our nation’s school food did not change for the worse overnight, but we can’t put the brakes on the damage it is doing fast enough. Read on for my Recipe for Success for school lunches.

A strong school-lunch program eliminates highly processed foods and puts a strong emphasis on fresh whole foods cooked from scratch. But, as you might imagine, choosing fresh, locally grown foods presents schools with all kinds of challenges. Unlike those of 20 or 30 years ago, most of the cafeterias in today’s schools lack fully functional kitchens and the trained staff to operate them, which makes actual cooking a virtual impossibility. Additionally, inadequate funding makes it extremely difficult to shift from highly processed to locally grown fresh food.

There are five major challenges to making school food healthier: food, finance, facilities, human resources/education, and marketing.

FOOD: To effectively implement a healthier school-lunch program, we need to eliminate:

• Highly processed foods full of sugar, salt, fat, additives, preservatives, and coloring

• Trans fats

• High-fructose corn syrup (HFCS)

• Fried foods

• Refined sugars and flours

• Vending machines that sell soda, candy, and chips

• Hormones and antibiotics

• Competitive foods, foods that are sold in school cafeterias but not part of the National School Lunch Program and therefore not regulated by USDA policies (the recently passed Healthy Hunger Free Kids Act will eventually give authority over these types of foods to the USDA). This means that day after day, children with money can buy such unhealthy items as fried foods, cookies, sodas, Slushees, and chips.

We should institute:

• Gardening classes

• Cooking classes

• Tastings and Rainbow Days held in cafeterias, as well as during cooking and gardening classes; these are a great way to get students to try unfamiliar foods, even something as simple as tasting different varieties of the same type of fruit can be a palate-widening experience for children.

• 30-minute lunch periods

• Recess before lunch

• Salad Bars and programs like Let’s Move Salad Bars to Schools (Video)

• Cooking from scratch, which absolutely must be the focus of any healthy school-lunch program. Schools across the nation need to say good-bye to chicken nuggets and hello to roast chicken, toss out the french fries and get busy roasting potatoes and other colorful root vegetables. Canned fruits and vegetables should move over and make room for fresh ones. The Lunch Box website has all the tools schools need to help cook and serve healthier food.

FACILITIES: Building, rebuilding, or retrofitting cooking facilities is a mandatory part of the change toward a healthier school food system.

FINANCING: All U.S public schools need more money to adequately finance their breakfast and lunch programs. Currently, the federal reimbursement rate is $2.77 per lunch. Most schools spend less than $1 on food per child per day, and this is just not enough.

HUMAN RESOURCES: Unlike school-cafeteria staff of the past, most of today’s kitchen workers lack adequate food-service training. If we want better food for our children, then we have to hire, train, and adequately compensate professional staff.

MARKETING: It’s one thing to make the food, another to get kids to eat it. Many successful school lunch programs around the country have employed traditional marketing techniques that treat children as potential customers: They “sell” the food. Attractive advertising, packaging, and service have been shown to increase consumption of a larger variety of school-lunch foods.

If we are going to positively impact the health of our children and our children’s children, then we need to make a change and make it now. I believe that we must demand the following:

Universal breakfast and lunch–healthy school meals should be a birthright in America

Make school meals a health initiative and equate healthy school food to long-term healthy Americans

Raise the federal reimbursement rate for lunch by $1.00, with a sliding scale based on local demographics

Implement the new Institute of Medicine Guidelines

Promote fresh fruits, fresh vegetables, and whole grains

Institute Farm-to-School Programs and hands-on experiential cooking and gardening programs on a national basis

Dedicate federal funds to rebuild kitchens

Institute a National marketing campaign to make school food cool food

Federally fund culinary “boot camps” to train school food-service staff to cook real food

Finally, we all need to do just one thing, just one thing every day to make the health of our children and our food supply a priority.
Perhaps, just perhaps, if we can do all of this we just might save our children–and the planet as well.

Maria Rodale: Lunch Lessons: Recipe for Success.

August 9, 2011, Health Day

As parents prepare to send their children back to school, they need to remember that nutrition is an important factor in academic performance, an expert advises.

Studies have shown that children who eat healthy, balanced breakfasts and lunches are more alert throughout the school day and also earn higher marks than those who have an unhealthy diet, says Mary Pat Alfaro, clinical manager of the division of nutrition therapy at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center, in a center news release.

A healthy breakfast includes a variety of foods such as fiber-rich and whole-grain cereals with low fat milk; yogurt and berries; toast, eggs and 100 percent fruit juice; or whole wheat bagels and cream cheese with low-fat milk.

When packing lunches, use the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Food Guide Pyramid, Alfaro suggests. Include at least two servings from the bread group and one serving from each of the other food groups.

One way to prevent children from becoming bored with their lunches is to use pitas, bagels, English muffins, crackers or tortillas to make sandwiches instead of using bread all the time.

Alfaro also suggests packing fruit such as grapes, strawberries, apple wedges or melon chunks that’s quick and easy to eat. Including a toothpick and a dipping sauce made with yogurt can coax reluctant fruit eaters to try it.

Children should be encouraged to drink low-fat white milk or plain or sugar-free flavored water. They should not drink beverages with added supplements such as herbs and caffeine, Alfaro says.

Healthy Lunch and Breakfast Keep Students Alert – US News and World Report.

July 1, 2011, Reuters, Kerry Grens

Menu labels on cafeteria food — highlighting the good and the bad of various meal options — make no difference in college students’ meal choices, a new study concludes.

The results add to evidence that, despite laws in some cities mandating calorie counts on fast-food menus, nutritional information makes little difference to people when they are eating out.

“Although it is important to inform consumers about the nutritional characteristics of the food offered, providing nutrition information in less healthy food environments such as fast-food restaurants is unlikely to alter consumers’ food choices,” wrote Christine Hoefkens and Dr. Wim Verbeke, two authors of the study, in an email to Reuters Health.

Hoefkens, Verbeke and their colleagues, based at Ghent University in Belgium, asked 224 people who regularly ate at two of the university’s cafeterias to log their diets for several days.

Then, the researchers put up posters in the cafeterias that rated meals on how healthy they were: zero stars for the least healthy to three stars for the most healthy. Study participants and other diners didn’t know that the posters were part of a study.

Labels next to menu items also highlighted whether a meal was high in salt, calories, saturated fat or vegetables.

Six months later, the participants, who were mostly female undergraduates, again logged what they ate for a few days.

Though the researchers predicted that the diners would have responded to the posters and made healthier food choices, they found no difference in the number of meals eaten from each star category.

Dr. Lisa Harnack, a professor at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis who was not involved in this study, said she was not surprised by the results.

“In studies, when you ask people how important nutrition is to them when they’re ordering food from a restaurant menu, it’s far less important than a food price or taste. It’s just not a consideration,” Harnack told Reuters Health.

What’s concerning about the college student population, Hoefkens and Verbeke said, is that cafeteria meals are often the main source of food for students.

Cities such as New York and Philadelphia require fast-food chain restaurants to include calorie information on menus.

The health care reform law that passed in 2010 will also require that fast-food restaurants and vending machines include nutritional information.

Dr. Gail Kaye, the nutrition program director at Ohio State University, told Reuters Health that menu labels might still work to encourage healthier eating — it’s just that they need to be paired with a healthier-leaning menu.

In the Ghent study, for instance, 70 percent of the meals earned zero or one stars, both before and after the labels. The students’ meal choices mirrored the proportion of offerings in each star category.

“If they had more healthy options there, they might have chosen them,” said Kaye.

SOURCE: bit.ly/j1MMkF The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, online June 15, 2011.

via Menu labels don’t influence students’ food choices | Reuters.

Reuters, Adam Marcus, November 23, 2010

Teens who live in households where food is scarce suffer academically, but a new study has found that government programs to provide meals in schools can reverse this effect.

According to the researchers, the findings suggest that school programs aimed at reducing so-called food insecurity can break an insidious cycle of poverty: poor children go hungry, get bad grades, don’t go on to college and fail to rise out of their socioeconomic status — raising children whose lives follow the same unfortunate narrative.

“Food insecurity is more problematic in the long term if it occurs prior to adolescence, but it doesn’t mean that adolescents are more resilient than younger children,” said study leader Christelle Roustit, of the Research Group on the Social Determinants of Health and Healthcare, in Paris, France. The researchers reported their findings in the medical journal Pediatrics.

The severe recession has taken a toll on food security. In the United States, a recent report by the Department of Agriculture found that nearly 15% of American households faced food insecurity at some point in 2009, the highest level since officials began tracking the measure in 1995.

Food insecurity in childhood is thought to undercut scholastic achievement in at least two ways. It deprives the body of nutrients necessary for proper mental and physical development, and it creates an atmosphere of stress and uncertainty that saps a kid’s desire to attend school and to perform well.

In the new study, Roustit and her colleagues analyzed questionnaires given to 2,346 public high school students in Quebec, Canada, along with nearly 2,000 of their parents. The surveys asked about issues of school performance and socioeconomic status and included several questions addressing food security at home. These included whether a lack of money prevented the family from eating enough, or from buying a sufficient variety of foods.

Just over 11 percent of teens in the study experienced food insecurity at home, according to the researchers. Of those, two-thirds attended schools that offered free or low-cost breakfast, lunch or snacks, allowing the researchers to look for an effect of the meals program on academic performance.

The study revealed that food insecurity was strongly associated with problems in school. However, children with food insecurity at home performed significantly better academically if their school offered meal assistance. They were much less likely to be held back a year, to score badly in language testing or to rate their overall academic performance as poor.

Although the data come from the 1990s, Roustit said a new survey of Quebec adolescents is now in progress. “We would be able to compare the results of 1999 to 2009 in few years,” she said.

Nicola Edwards, a dietician and food policy expert at California Food Policy Advocates, an Oakland-based nonprofit, said the results of the study are unsurprising. If children are hungry they cannot learn, Edwards said. “There is a direct correlation between food insecurity and academic performance,” she said.

In the United States, teachers and school administrators report that children who take advantage of food assistance programs in schools have improved behavior, fewer absences and better test scores, Edwards added.

Under the federal Child Nutrition Act, more than 31 million American school children receive free or inexpensive lunches through the National School Lunch Program. Children from families with incomes at or below 130 percent of the poverty level ($28,665 for a family of four) are eligible for free meals. Those with incomes between 130 percent and 185 percent of the poverty level ($40,793 for a family of four) are eligible to receive lunch for a cost of no more than 40 cents.

According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the National School Lunch Program cost $9.8 billion in 2009. A study of this program that was published earlier this year supports the Canadian findings. Dr. Peter Hinrichs at Georgetown University in Washington DC reported in the Journal of Policy Analysis and Management that for children who participate in the National School Lunch Program, “the effects on educational attainment are sizable.”

SOURCES: link.reuters.com/xyz76q Pediatrics online November 22, 2010 andlink.reuters.com/syz76q Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, online June 3, 2010.

via School lunch programs might break poverty cycle | Reuters.