Tuesday, February 25, 2014

Michelle's 'Get Fit' initiative .

School Lunches are in danger of going hungry.
I am just shaking my head at this , and you might think I am over critical  and so on that  Michelle Obama and her fight against child hood obesity is not a bad thing  . Sure it's a good thing , but there is something that not clicking right as a image maker for the First Lady of the nation .  @Why can't she have  been focused on ending poverty on the national level  ? I know that School foods across the nation have been the subject of issues,yes there is lots of grease , lots of sugars. The problem is that children don't eat their lunch anyway, they throw it away anyhow regardless .  It's hard to get a grip on what is healthy at a school lunch table.  ***You NEVER HAVE PARENTAL INPUT ON THIS anyway!!  The proposed rules are part of first lady Michelle Obama's Let's Move initiative to combat child obesity, which is celebrating its fourth anniversary this week. Mrs. Obama and Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack announced the new rules at a White House event.  ##Rules set to go into effect next school year will make other foods around school healthier as well, including in vending machines and separate "a la carte" lines in the lunch room. Calorie, fat, sugar and sodium limits will have to be met on almost every food and beverage sold during the school day at 100,000 schools. Concessions sold at afterschool sports games would be exempt. The healthier food rules have come under fire from conservatives who think the government shouldn't dictate what kids eat - and from some students who don't like the healthier foods.  Some on-campus marketing will be slowly phased out, however, and there are ways that schools can opt out of the new limitations altogether. The other, less flashy announcement made today will have a much broader, more sustained impact: universal free school meals for all students at more than 22,000 schools around the United States. The 9 million children who will receive breakfast and lunch at no cost starting on July 1 attend schools where at least 40 percent of the students are eligible for free or reduced-cost meals. Among other problems the universal meal program will eliminate is the social stigma that subsidized breakfast and lunch programs create for low-income students. No longer will these students be ostracized or, worse, forgo free or low-cost meals to not tip off their peers to the poverty they experience at home. It sounds good , but School Districts could lose money here is a news item . School officials in Carmel Clay, Ind., said they lost $300,000 last school year because students are rejecting the healthy menu changes brought on by First Lady Michelle Obama’s federal lunch regulations.  A school in New York that was getting rid of the Mrs.  Obama way of feeding kids  because they were hungry at the end of the school. They didn't like the food. They weren't eating it. There wasn't enough of it.  Now we have this other district here in Indiana losing hundreds of thousands of dollars trying to comply and failing because the kids hate it. Damage is already done. Many districts were already forced to increase the price of lunches even if they didn't want to. There is no chance those prices will come down, even after the rules are 'relaxed'. Many also had to spend hundred of thousands to millions of dollars in order to comply with the new rules.

NOTES AND COMMENTS:

***Parents are up in arms, saying their kids can’t learn because they’re so hungry. There is no provision in the guidelines to recognize the difference between a 250 pound linebacker and a 90 pound cheerleader…..There are two reasons for why a lot of these kids are ending up just plain hungry: the strict federal limits on fat, carbs and calories aren’t giving them enough food to fill them up, and many kids just won’t eat the food that’s being forced on them, like dark brown whole wheat bread and chocolate skim milk. All this hunger is the result of the ironically-named “Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act of 2010,” which got Washington involved in local school cafeterias by providing federal funds in exchange for control over the menu. ##  Even the scoreboards in high school gyms will have to advertise only healthy foodsunder new rules announced Tuesday by the Obama administration. The "obesity epidemic," could be more readily addressed by having schools (at the K-8 level) expand the lunch time, outdoor and gym recess periods to what they were, 20-25 years ago. At some schools, the kids have to wolf down their food in 20 minutes, and get a whopping 15 minutes of recess. An hour of the school day used to be allotted to lunch plus recess - about 30 minutes of each. The schools have got the mealtime and recess shrunk from an hour, to only 35 minutes. Also, when home, a lot less time on the video games and i pads, where the parent is in direct authority, would go a long way towards reducing obesity in children. @ Kids were eating fine. The fact that kids are fat in America is a testament to how well-fed they are.

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