News and notes from reader emails, the news, and life in general:
USDA Lunch Follies, Part One
If I’ve said it once, I’ve said it at least twice: when a government program fails, government officials interpret the failure as proof that they should do it again – only bigger!
Students all over the country are complaining about the tasteless and unsatisfying lunches mandated by the USDA, and they’re throwing away the fruits and vegetables the USDA requires them to put on their plates. So how does the USDA respond to this failure? By encouraging parents to serve the same kinds of meals at home, of course:
Government-approved school meals as a model for the family dinner table?
Responding to concerns that students are throwing away the healthy food on their cafeteria trays, the U.S. Department of Agriculture acknowledged that adapting to the changes “may be challenging at first, as students are introduced to new flavors and foods in the cafeteria.”
Actually, geniuses, if you pay attention to the students’ complaints, you’ll recognize that the “challenge” stems from less flavor and less food, not the “newness” of it all.
But the government also says parents can help schools make the taste-transition easier:
“We know that many parents are already making changes at home to help the whole family eat healthier,” the USDA blogged on Monday. “We recommend reviewing school menus with kids at home and working to incorporate foods that are being served at school into family meals as much as possible.”
Brilliant idea.
“Hey, kids, let’s review those lunches you hate at school and talk about serving the same foods for family dinners as well.”
“Great idea, Mom. In these tough economic times, you definitely want to buy a lot of food that Sis and I will toss in the trash.”
Let me interpret the USDA’s suggestion: Parents, if you serve crappy, unsatisfying meals at home, your kids won’t be so quick to recognize that their school lunches are crappy and unsatisfying.
USDA Lunch Follies, Part Two
The USDA orders school kids to put foods on their plates they don’t want to eat, so the students (surprise!) toss those foods into the trash. Hmmm, how should we deal with this? Stop insisting kids take foods they don’t want? Let them decide for themselves what they’ll eat for lunch? Nawwww … the obvious next move here is to conduct a careful study of the trash.
After finding out that most of the fruits and vegetables on the school lunch menu ended up in the trash, school board members in the Lake County school district in central Florida are considering attaching cameras to school cafeteria trash cans to study what students are tossing out.
“How many hours of trash-can video have you reviewed, Jenkins?”
“Sixteen.”
“And what have you seen?”
“So far, I’ve seen 437 kids giving us the finger.”
“Interesting. I didn’t think kindergartners could even spot a spycam.”
“Yes, they’re a bright bunch, sir.”
“I said, how about we put cameras in the trash cans so we can document the concrete data of what students are throwing out,” School Board member Tod Howard told NBC News. “That way we can not only show what the students are not eating, but we can also look at how presentation affects consumption and present that data to the federal government if we need to.”
Ahh, yes, that’s why the kids are throwing away the fruits and vegetables they’re forced to put on their plates: unappealing presentations. If you arrange carrots in amusing patterns, kids will snap them up.
Howard said he made the suggestion as a 2010 federal law on child nutrition, vigorously promoted by first lady Michelle Obama, went into effect in schools across the nation.
Among other things, the law requires schools across the county to serve an increased number of vegetables, including weekly servings of leafy greens, red or orange vegetables, and legumes. Students must take at least one serving, but according to officials from the Lake County Food Services Department, Howard said, that led students last year to toss about $75,000 worth of produce in the garbage.
“They have to take it, and then it ends up in the trash can. And that’s a waste of taxpayer money, and it’s also not giving students the nutrition that they need.”
I don’t know why spending tax dollars on food that ends up in the trash would concern anyone. According to prevailing economic theories, that’s a “stimulus” program. I’m surprised Paul Krugman hasn’t called for continually increasing the amount of unwanted food we force students to take until we reach full employment. Better yet, we should borrow money from the Chinese to buy vegetables grown in China, ship them to the U.S., then throw them away.
Howard said the idea is still in its early stages, and he and other school board members are still working out logistics. While he says the actual cost of the initiative for the 40,000-student district has not yet been quantified, he suspected it would be low because he proposed re-purposing old security cameras that the school already owns for the trash can monitoring.
Well, that’s what I love about government: the never-ending quest for thrift and efficiency. Re-purposing existing security cameras and conducting a video study of the lunch-room trash would definitely be cheaper than, say, tapping a few dozen kids on the shoulder and saying, “Excuse me, do you mind telling me which part of your USDA-mandated lunch you’re throwing in the trash and why?”
Big Boomers
The USDA started making dietary recommendations in the 1970s. That means the baby-boomers were the first generation affected by those guidelines. Let’s see how that’s working out:
The Baby Boomer generation’s overall health has been on a sharp decline.
Australian researchers from Adelaide’s three universities have completed the first stage of a report on the generation born between the end of the Second World War and the mid-1960s.
Obesity among baby boomers is more than double the rate of their parents at the same age, and boomers with three or more chronic conditions was 700 percent greater than the previous generation.
When I was talking to Dr. Ann Childers on the low-carb cruise, she mentioned something about all those baby-boomers running around shirtless at Woodstock in 1969, sporting “flat bellies they didn’t deserve.” By “didn’t deserve,” she of course meant they weren’t dieting or exercising or otherwise making efforts to be thin. They just were. That was before the USDA started telling us how to eat. Take a look at some pictures from Woodstock:
The generation that warned its members to never trust anybody over age 30 should have checked the ages of the people who came up with the Food Pyramid.
As the first wave of baby-boomer reached age 60, many of them were fond of saying “Sixty is the new forty.” Yeah, right. Here’s a little thought experiment: Imagine your great-grandfather at age 40. Now put him in a contest with an average 60-year-old from today … foot race, softball game, boxing match, bar brawl, whatever. Who would you bet on?
Okay, that was too easy. Now suppose your 60-year-old great-grandfather was up against an average 40-year-old today. Who would you bet on? I’ve seen a picture of my great-grandfather in his 60s. I’m betting on him.
Professor Graeme Hugo from the University of Adelaide said the findings were alarming and evidence that new public policies were needed.
Professor Hugo, public policies are what got us into this mess. Public policies are the reason school kids in the U.S. are tossing their lunches into the trash. If we’re looking for answers, perhaps we should start by examining the public policies (and lack thereof) back when the baby-boomers’ parents and grandparents managed to feed themselves without becoming fat and sick.
Scientists Are Freakin’ Liars
I’ll preface this by saying (again) that I don’t believe most scientists are liars. But far too many are, and I believe the motivation for being freakin’ liars usually boils down to one of two reasons:
1. They have a pet theory and want that theory to be right.
2. They want to keep the grant money flowing in.
A recent article in The Register points to the second cause:
Medical boffins are rarely wrong when they publish in journals – but some are prepared to lie quite a lot, according to a new study on retracted scientific papers.
Previous studies have claimed that most papers are pulled from publication because there’s some error in them, but this fresh investigation claims malpractice is actually responsible for two-thirds of all retractions.
Boffin misconduct includes copying others’ findings and plagiarism, but fraud and suspected fraud are the biggest problem and that’s increased ten-fold since 1975. For this new study, 2,047 biomedical and life-science research articles indexed by PubMed that were retracted by 3 May, 2012 were reviewed.
The researchers aren’t sure why so many scientists are now willing to steal their results, but the increasingly desperate competition for funding might have something to do with it.
Milking governments for cash for projects with no obvious monetary value has always been tough, but the global recession is making it worse – and it’s feared some scientists have bent their findings to suit paymasters’ agendas to guarantee funding.
Scientists bending their findings to suit their paymasters’ agendas is nothing new, of course. We wouldn’t have a $30 billion statin industry otherwise. The difference is that statins do have a monetary value, if very little health value.
“Scientists are human, and some of them will succumb to this pressure, especially when there’s so much competition for funding,” said Arturo Casadevall, a professor of microbiology, immunology and medicine at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York.
The academic, who is the senior author of the study, continued: “Perhaps our most telling finding is what happened after 2005, which is when the number of retractions began to skyrocket. That’s exactly when National Institutes of Health (NIH) funding began to get very tight.
I think the lesson for the scientists is obvious: if you want to continue milking governments for cash for projects with no obvious monetary value, get out of the medical-research business and start a solar-energy company … or a company that provides vegetables for school lunches.
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Nathaniel, I’ve been a weightlifter since I was 13. I just turned 48. I’ve been through every conceivable diet known to man, and I can tell you, if a weightlifter or bodybuilder could get bigger or stronger from drinking sewer water, they would drink it. In my 20s I was very meticulous with diet, keeping a meal log broken down into protein, carbs and fats. I would include the protein in bread, pasta, even mushrooms.
I’ve been low carb off an on for 10 years, mostly keeping things close to the Zone Diet. Within the last two years, I have been really low carb, and I can tell you its no better or worse than any other diet for weightlifting. I didn’t lose any strength. What strength I did gain is strength lost over the years, which is a product of changing exercises periodically. I use dumbbells, barbells, some cable, and am proficient with the kettlebell, performing movements that went out of style ages ago that were favorites of the old time strongmen.
My endurance hasn’t improved, but that’s me and has nothing to do with diet. That’s just my make up. What I am saying is that you CAN do low carb and lift weights and do very well with it.
Hi Tom i just thought it would be nice to share this interesting video on how sugar is made. I found it quite interesting to see how the thing that’s making us sick is made.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZBOou6cahtw&feature=related
Industrialized diabetes.
Ironically, this issue was addressed in Super Size Me, in the one (and only) part I thought was worth a crap. Granted, there was an implicit anti-fat message, but it was still a nauseating exposure of at least some public schools’ cafeteria menus. Things like that segment and this new USDA nonsense have made me think about the fact that nobody is going to do as good a job feeding my daughter as I will. The school and government may claim that they want to, but the result renders the intent irrelevant (as always).
Consistent with that idea, I agree that parents are ultimately to blame when their children become fat and unhealthy. Yes, the government is providing bad information and policies, but we ought to know from the struggles our Founding Fathers’ fought that this is an inevitable result of government interference (unhappiness, I mean, with which obesity and poor health can be associated). All parents should be protesting as loudly as we are in this forum. That most of them are not leads me to believe the real problem is more in our culture than in our government.
That problem is an automatic deference to authority. I think a large number of people, pathetically, live in awe of authority figures and experts, not considering how ephemeral, feeble, and shallow these statuses really are, and with hardly any pride in or concern for their own autonomy and liberty. Our culture will bend over and welcome the probe, if the experts or authorities told us we ought to. In that regard, I think we’ve gotten the government we earned through this attitude.
If the USDA or any other morons ever try to feed my daughter, I’ll tell them where they can go stick their advice and their authority. But I fear I am in the minority. Just as the fast food addict is guilty of his own obesity, so are the government advice addicts responsible for their own degraded health and loss of freedom. The government is culpable, but the people are more so for either trusting the government or for rolling over and submitting.
As the old saying goes, people get the government they deserve. Unfortunately, that applies to people as a group. Individuals get stuck with the bad government their fellow citizens voted to foist on them.
At the end of the day pick up the garbage…err fruits and vegetables, and re-serve it the next day.
Reduce, reuse, recycle.
Regurgitate!!
Hi Tom i just thought it would be nice to share this interesting video on how sugar is made. I found it quite interesting to see how the thing that’s making us sick is made.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZBOou6cahtw&feature=related
Industrialized diabetes.
I ate school lunches through most of grade school-high school, and ‘if you could afford it you could have it’ was pretty much the motto in the cafeteria back then. I was in high school from 1994-1998; I was never overweight then. My full-time working mom managed to feed me well enough for breakfasts and dinners at home that the cookies and soft-serve and Fruitopia juice-like beverages I often consumed for lunch never seemed to add up on my frame. I must have been consuming 500 grams of carbohydrate some days…and it was mostly sugar! I’m saying all this because back then we had candy and soda machines and could eat food in class and drink sodas all day, but I really didn’t know very many overweight kids. I guess the knowledge of what is actually good for us (home cooked low-carb meals and plenty of natural fat) and what is bad for us (candy, sugar, bread) never really mattered to those of us lucky enough to have a mom that cooked meats and veggies for our meals growing up. I always loved eating meals at home–my friends’ parents made Mac and cheese and hot dogs for dinner! My friends always wanted to come to MY house for dinners and I never understood why back then 🙂 As a LCHF eater for years now, my mom laments letting us drink 2% milk and eat cereal, but she knows it didn’t ruin my health, because she mostly fed us real food. She just fed us how her mother fed her, but partially succumbed to the fat-phobia of the 90’s.
I guess my point is just this: the education on what’s nutritious and what’s not has to start at home. But since the current low-fat dogma is what people believe I don’t think the current government approach will ‘thin out’ the kids today. It’s just become such a mess that the only solution is to start from scratch with our own kids and keep getting the truth out there. That’s what I’m doing with my two year old now; all I can do is feed him meats and veggies and eggs and butter and teach him to love real foods and set a good example with his robust health.
Thanks for the great post, Tom! I love posting them to Facebook so my fat-phobia friends and family can continue thinking I’m insane. Oh well. Maybe some of them will read them and learn something.
We can always hope.
Ironically, this issue was addressed in Super Size Me, in the one (and only) part I thought was worth a crap. Granted, there was an implicit anti-fat message, but it was still a nauseating exposure of at least some public schools’ cafeteria menus. Things like that segment and this new USDA nonsense have made me think about the fact that nobody is going to do as good a job feeding my daughter as I will. The school and government may claim that they want to, but the result renders the intent irrelevant (as always).
Consistent with that idea, I agree that parents are ultimately to blame when their children become fat and unhealthy. Yes, the government is providing bad information and policies, but we ought to know from the struggles our Founding Fathers’ fought that this is an inevitable result of government interference (unhappiness, I mean, with which obesity and poor health can be associated). All parents should be protesting as loudly as we are in this forum. That most of them are not leads me to believe the real problem is more in our culture than in our government.
That problem is an automatic deference to authority. I think a large number of people, pathetically, live in awe of authority figures and experts, not considering how ephemeral, feeble, and shallow these statuses really are, and with hardly any pride in or concern for their own autonomy and liberty. Our culture will bend over and welcome the probe, if the experts or authorities told us we ought to. In that regard, I think we’ve gotten the government we earned through this attitude.
If the USDA or any other morons ever try to feed my daughter, I’ll tell them where they can go stick their advice and their authority. But I fear I am in the minority. Just as the fast food addict is guilty of his own obesity, so are the government advice addicts responsible for their own degraded health and loss of freedom. The government is culpable, but the people are more so for either trusting the government or for rolling over and submitting.
As the old saying goes, people get the government they deserve. Unfortunately, that applies to people as a group. Individuals get stuck with the bad government their fellow citizens voted to foist on them.
At the end of the day pick up the garbage…err fruits and vegetables, and re-serve it the next day.
Reduce, reuse, recycle.
Regurgitate!!
I ate school lunches through most of grade school-high school, and ‘if you could afford it you could have it’ was pretty much the motto in the cafeteria back then. I was in high school from 1994-1998; I was never overweight then. My full-time working mom managed to feed me well enough for breakfasts and dinners at home that the cookies and soft-serve and Fruitopia juice-like beverages I often consumed for lunch never seemed to add up on my frame. I must have been consuming 500 grams of carbohydrate some days…and it was mostly sugar! I’m saying all this because back then we had candy and soda machines and could eat food in class and drink sodas all day, but I really didn’t know very many overweight kids. I guess the knowledge of what is actually good for us (home cooked low-carb meals and plenty of natural fat) and what is bad for us (candy, sugar, bread) never really mattered to those of us lucky enough to have a mom that cooked meats and veggies for our meals growing up. I always loved eating meals at home–my friends’ parents made Mac and cheese and hot dogs for dinner! My friends always wanted to come to MY house for dinners and I never understood why back then 🙂 As a LCHF eater for years now, my mom laments letting us drink 2% milk and eat cereal, but she knows it didn’t ruin my health, because she mostly fed us real food. She just fed us how her mother fed her, but partially succumbed to the fat-phobia of the 90’s.
I guess my point is just this: the education on what’s nutritious and what’s not has to start at home. But since the current low-fat dogma is what people believe I don’t think the current government approach will ‘thin out’ the kids today. It’s just become such a mess that the only solution is to start from scratch with our own kids and keep getting the truth out there. That’s what I’m doing with my two year old now; all I can do is feed him meats and veggies and eggs and butter and teach him to love real foods and set a good example with his robust health.
Thanks for the great post, Tom! I love posting them to Facebook so my fat-phobia friends and family can continue thinking I’m insane. Oh well. Maybe some of them will read them and learn something.
We can always hope.
@Bruce. I am pretty sure that is a private school and not receiving gov subsidies. I would expect lunch like that if i was paying out the wazoo for my kids to attend the school.
@Bruce. I am pretty sure that is a private school and not receiving gov subsidies. I would expect lunch like that if i was paying out the wazoo for my kids to attend the school.
Well since the USDA is so fat-phobic I bet the cooked veggies given to kids are steamed or boiled until limp and lifeless and just plain nasty. And since they are sodium-phobic they are probably unsalted too. Just plopped on a plate with no way to dress them up.
When I was a kid back in the 60s my mom served “veggies” that were just the square blocks of freezer-burned frozen veggies tossed into a saucepan and boiled to death, and just plopped on a plate. No wonder I grew up loathing veggies! I was amazed when I grew up and got served veggies lightly sauteed in olive oil or butter, with some salt and garlic. YUM, suddenly I loved veggies! But I bet you anything that’s not the kind of veggies the kids are getting. And if they do get green salads I bet also that they don’t get any decent salad dressings with them! So again a no-win for the salads.
They’re almost certainly served with little or not fat. And the irony is that without fat, you don’t absorb many of the nutrients in vegetables.
Well since the USDA is so fat-phobic I bet the cooked veggies given to kids are steamed or boiled until limp and lifeless and just plain nasty. And since they are sodium-phobic they are probably unsalted too. Just plopped on a plate with no way to dress them up.
When I was a kid back in the 60s my mom served “veggies” that were just the square blocks of freezer-burned frozen veggies tossed into a saucepan and boiled to death, and just plopped on a plate. No wonder I grew up loathing veggies! I was amazed when I grew up and got served veggies lightly sauteed in olive oil or butter, with some salt and garlic. YUM, suddenly I loved veggies! But I bet you anything that’s not the kind of veggies the kids are getting. And if they do get green salads I bet also that they don’t get any decent salad dressings with them! So again a no-win for the salads.
They’re almost certainly served with little or not fat. And the irony is that without fat, you don’t absorb many of the nutrients in vegetables.
My son and daughter are subjected to the requirement to take a fruit or vegetable or they will be charged more for their meals. So they just throw out the crap. We only buy whole milk for our home. In the old Soviet Union, restaurants had a minimum weight quota for food that was thrown out and not eaten by the patrons. The restaurants prepared the food so it was inedidble (this was not practiced in those restaurants that catered to visitors from Western Europe and the USA, which were exempt from the regulations). Somehow, this new dietary insanity reminds me of that.
They’re charged extra for NOT taking food? Only in government …
My son and daughter are subjected to the requirement to take a fruit or vegetable or they will be charged more for their meals. So they just throw out the crap. We only buy whole milk for our home. In the old Soviet Union, restaurants had a minimum weight quota for food that was thrown out and not eaten by the patrons. The restaurants prepared the food so it was inedidble (this was not practiced in those restaurants that catered to visitors from Western Europe and the USA, which were exempt from the regulations). Somehow, this new dietary insanity reminds me of that.
They’re charged extra for NOT taking food? Only in government …
“We know that many parents are already making changes at home to help the whole family eat healthier,” the USDA blogged on Monday. “We recommend reviewing school menus with kids at home and working to incorporate foods that are being served at school into family meals as much as possible.”
Next will be the food police running cameras on the trash cans in peoples’ homes.
Don’t give them any ideas.