The Trump administration announced Friday that it is rolling back Obama-era regulations that govern nutritional requirements for school meals and giving local schools greater latitude and flexibility in the choice of food that they offer students.
The media have depicted these changes as a sop to the food industry and a disservice to children nationwide—especially disadvantaged children from lower-income families, since they depend more on school meals. These youngsters supposedly now will be consuming less nutritious and unhealthy food as a result.
I hate to be the bearer of good news, but this is simply untrue. And the reason it is untrue is that much of what we think we know about nutrition simply ain’t so.
The longstanding proscription on fatty food is the most commonly held misconception. In a separate post, I report why this misperception and other conventional ideas about health and nutrition are wrong.
For the purpose of this post, suffice it to say that bad and dated nutritional science helps to explain why school administrators and cafeteria workers welcome the Trump administration’s move to make the school meals program less rigid and more accommodating of ground truth, so to speak.
It is not, obviously, that they are indifferent to children’s health, nor that they are shills for the food industry. Instead, their concerns are very practical. Students, they observe, are too often rejecting the food that is being offered to them.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) conducted a “School Nutrition and Meal Cost Study” that found “children are throwing 25 percent of nutrients straight into the trash can. This is not serving children well,” says the USDA.
Science Says. Why are students rejecting the food that is being served them? Because school meal plans too often are based on bad and dated nutritional science that says fat and sodium are bad, but fruit and whole-grains are an unalloyed good.
“Completely eliminating or limiting fat from your diet can actually make you gain weight, often because it leaves you feeling so deprived,” reports CNN. “Conversely, some studies have found that fatty foods can aid in weight loss.”
“The problem with most diets,” writes Mark Hyman, MD, author of the Eat Fat, Get Thin Cookbook, “is that they lack the key ingredient, [fat], that makes food taste good and cuts your hunger.”
It is not hard, then, to discern why students have rejected the ostensibly healthy meals foisted upon them by Michelle Obama and her coterie of self-anointed “children’s health advocates”:
First, these meals are not as healthy as advertised—mainly because they seek to radically reduce fat and sodium in a student’s diet; and second, because of their inflated reliance on carb-laden whole-grains, fruits and vegetables, these meals leave students hungry and longing for greater sustenance.
Local schools and school cafeteria workers know this, which is why they have pushed for greater latitude and flexibility in the choice of food that they offer students.
The Trump administration has wisely responded to their request, with regulations that retain legitimate nutritional standards (i.e., vegetables are still part of every student’s meal), while simultaneously ensuring that these standards are not so rigid and inflexible as to be counterproductive and self-defeating (because students discard the food given to them and procure unhealthy snacks elsewhere.)
Childhood Obesity. To be sure, Michelle Obama identified a real problem. Childhood obesity in America has become an epidemic—so much so that “roughly 31% of American youths [are] disqualified [from military service] because they are overweight.”
This is a national disgrace and a bona fide public health problem, which we ought to address and remedy as a nation. And, to the extent, that we are eliminating empty calories and excess carbohydrates from school meals, this is an indisputably good thing.
Indeed, soda and sugar water have no discernible health benefits whatsoever; they are genuinely harmful. Soda and sugar water induce obesity by replacing, crowding out, or superseding calories with real and requisite health benefits.
But trying to reduce or eliminate fat in a student’s diet is a big and health-debilitating mistake. Ditto the attempt to reduce or eliminate high-sodium food. And fruits and whole-grains are no panacea either because they are laden with sugar and carbohydrates, which are the real culprit in the obesity epidemic.
Even were it otherwise, students, like the rest of us, crave variety in their diet and food that is satisfying, satiating, and savory.
While well-intended, Michelle Obama’s school meal regs lost sight of this reality and were based on bad and dated nutritional science. Consequently, they were rejected by the very students they were designed to help.
The Trump administration, to its credit, recognizes that we can and must do better. Its reform of the school meals program is a promising start.