National School Lunch Program Threatened: Students Need Healthy, Nutritious Food

By Jessica Hoffman, Juliana Cohen, Lindsay Rosenfeld, and Edward Alan Miller The National School Lunch Program, administered by the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), provides a critical source of nutrition for over 31 million children in the United States every day. Children living in poverty depend on these meals as a main food source. During the Obama administration, lawmakers passed the Healthy Hunger Free Kids Act in 2010 in an effort to curb this country’s obesity epidemic and to maximize children’s learning and development. The Act directed the USDA to improve the nutritional content of school meals. Specific changes included increasing the amount of fruits, vegetables, and whole grains, and decreasing sodium and milk fat. These healthier school meal standards had strong support from parents. They also had strong support from the military, which views children’s health as a matter of national security. This is in the face of recruitment challenges stemming from the high proportion of young adults who are too obese to serve. Even so, the Trump administration recently announced that it would allow the USDA to roll back several of the regulations associated with these provisions due to concerns about food waste. This is despite the breadth of scientific evidence that supports the benefits of healthier school meals. Several years ago, one of us (Juliana Cohen) responded to concerns expressed in the media about making school meals healthier by...
Source: Healthy Living - The Huffington Post - Category: Consumer Health News Source Type: news