Talk Elections

Clearly, they're not getting the needed calories to make it through the day.  Secondly, some schools are banning homemade lunches.
http://www.theblaze.com/stories/we-are-hungry-meet-the-students-and-teachers-behind-the-viral-video-mocking-michelle-obamas-new-lunch-mandates/ (http://www.theblaze.com/stories/we-are-hungry-meet-the-students-and-teachers-behind-the-viral-video-mocking-michelle-obamas-new-lunch-mandates/)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=2IB7NDUSBOo (http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=2IB7NDUSBOo)

Because Michelle Obama passed this, right?

Mocking someone does not really imply political opposition...

Not much, but it ties into the government dictating what one should eat.

Man, it's almost like schools are prisons.

...almost?

Why do you think I left public school and graduated via a charter high school?

Wait... telling kids they should eat healthy... and they object to it?!?!

Wait, I need to alert the authorities.... just wait right there...

Typical right-wing paranoia... 'omg, suggesting that kids shouldn't eat lard coated lard is an attack on our freedoms to give our kids heart disease and obesity!!!'... Besides, the rules would be applied by local school boards... you want to make a pathetic display... go harass them.

There is a line that shouldn't be crossed. It's irrelevant though. I believe the public school system in America has turned into a joke anyways.

You do realize it was Bush who wrote the guidelines, and they're just now taking effect.

Little B*ds can't vote yet anyway.

I have no sympathy for the fatties.  They should amend the rules to allow multiple servings for athletes, however, which seem to be a lot of the complaints.

I guess Naso was equally appalled when Laura Bush was telling kids to put down the video games and pick up a book.

I come from a very conservative area and this was in effect at my elementary school in the early-to-mid 1990s. The reasoning behind it was different, though: they didn't want the poor kids feeling "left out" or ashamed because their parents couldn't afford to send them homemade lunches.

Government pays for school lunches and they can set guidelines. No one's freedom is being violated here. If schools are going to serve food, it shouldn't be junk. 850 calories is a large portion of what is recommended for daily calorie intake, being more than half. Some people are programmed to overeat and probably go well over 200 calories a day, which explains why some of them are complaining of hunger. And some of this is probably just about not liking what is served rather than not getting enough to eat.

And? Bush is such a big government nanny. We know this.

The mandate is completely horrid. Capping the caloric intake at 850 calories per lunch? Insane. What about the kids who eat a reduced lunch because their parents can't afford to get them food? Then they are being screwed. Same with some of the kids on sports teams. You can't seriously expect anyone to eat only 850 calories off a school lunch and be able to get through a one-one and a half hour practice.

And for the argument that "it helps kids not overeat and prevent them from going over the recommended amount of calories", get a grip. 1800 (teenage girls) and 2200 (teenage boys) is relatively unhealthy for most teens.

By 2030, about half of America will be obese. States like Mississippi will lead the way with an expected 67% of them being obese. America is already viewed as something of a fat joke and will consider to be viewed that way until something is done. Tell me people whining about government telling them what they can and cannot eat - do you like the United States being viewed as a fat joke? Because those of us overseas consider you to be just that.

I'd much rather have America be considered "a fat joke" than it be a nanny state that prescribes precisely what you can and cannot eat.

Bull. It's all about control. I grew up in a very conservative area myself and they encouraged brownbagging it. Everybody did it.

Since schools are part of the government, they can set the can guidelines for what is served, since the food is paid for by the government. No one is stopping this kids from eating 4000 calories a day if they choose so, they just won't get served high calorie food at school.

I don't get how people think this is a law that outlaws certain foods, it isn't even close to that.

In the Serengeti, the animals subscribe to a "nanny state" system. The Wilderness gives the antelopes, giraffes, zebras etc a certain amount of grass to eat. The Wilderness that is the Serengeti also gives the lions, cheetahs etc a certain amount of antelope, buffalo etc to eat. This is why the Sarengeti doesn't have any fat f*** animals roaming around. Just think of the school system as The Wilderness and your country won't be the laughingstock of the world.

()

Yes and no.  School lunches are largely funded by the Federal Government, so school boards have to follow the Federal guidelines if they want to feed their kids from the Federal trough.

Strip away the facade, and most everything about most everybody in the current Democratic Party is all about control, not freedom.

It's disgraceful to see the Democratic Party emulating Social Democrats overseas. Once they reach the stage where they are mostly all Social Democrats, which could take anywhere from 10-25 more years, it's just a matter of time before they start emulating Socialists. This "progression" needs to be stopped dead in its track RIGHT NOW with the defeat of Barack Obama.

What the hell is this. I don't even. English? I'm supposed to think of the school system as a jungle or something? So we should give kids a limited amount of food and have them fight over it like the Hunger Games or something? Or, since nature has chosen to gift us with Twinkies, we should all have Twinkies? Please rephrase in a way that approaches some form of logical coherent thought.

His specific phrasing gives the impression that he supports the government telling people what they can eat.

That's alot of fruits and veggies to be equivalent of 4000 calories, their large intestines couldn't handle all that fiber intake in a short setting.  Not enough proteins and red meat in a government school diet unless the school menu has nuts, grains and fish.  Majority of kids do not like fish and seafood as an alternative of red and white meat for that matter.

Lets be honest, do we want to see kids being hungry? Probably not, but banning families from bringing outside food is an atrocity. Individual choices at home is where it begins and if the kids parents can't make that happen, then they're in for a rude awakening.

I don't think most schools are going to ban home lunches, I've only seen example of one doing that. It's doubtful that would become a trend.

Why is this even an issue?

Uh, the Serengeti is NOT a jungle. Do you not know anything about Africa? This is exactly why American schools need to stop giving junk food away at lunches.

A school banning students from bringing homemade lunches is a huge deal because it means that students/their parents do not have the right to control their own diet and it instead is subject to authorities while in school. People don't like to be controlled in a way they feel is totally unnecessary.

I know enough to know that you just misspelled Serengeti. Are you saying that junk food makes people stupid or are you just avoiding the question?

Because of Homeland Security - the Brown Bag Lunch could contain a bomb, gun, or other weapon.  Even a very firm unripened banana could be hazardous.

Uh, I only misspelled "Serengeti" because of cognitive dissonance. I was eating spaghetti, you see. My apologies. That is why I ended up merging the words together. But you are dodging the issue at hand by attacking my spelling of Serengeti.

Wait a second now, how many schools are banning kids from bringing their own lunch? And what if you don't qualify for free meals, are you still banned from bringing your own lunch? I am going to have to assume this is just a bunch of crap unless I see some proof this is being forced on schools nationwide, as opposed to some random school district doing it.

Of course the calorie limit is nationwide, and perfectly rational. Sure, an exception for athletes can be made but the rest of the kids should not be eating more than 800 calories for lunch! I don't get how this is controversial. If they still feel hungry after 800 calories, they need help! I'm serious here. One of the first signs of type 2 diabetes is polyphagia. They should go see a doctor rather than eat more food.

While you guys are so epically concerned about entering a 1984 like state, America is going through an actual crisis rather than an imagined one. That crisis is childhood obesity. Do you understand what will happen to those kids if they develop hypertension, diabetes and high cholesterol while in high school? Do you guys understand the consequences of that on the nation?

Apart from the point that Michelle Obama can't mandate anything... the right usually finds a place where someone has gone over the top and decided that the situation is wide-spread and indicative of evil democrats. To think otherwise requires common sense and critical thought and... yeah. But they're two separate issues anyway, using the school to teach healthy eating is a good thing and obviously banning school lunches is stupid (but I'd also like to see evidence that would merit the righteous indignation of some).

Considering there often is a connection between income and health, as well as the quality of food available - I take it they're happy to pay for these kids' medical bills when the time comes.

Only in America would adults support kids acting like...well, kids, rather than telling them to tough it out and eat their veggies. Probably a bunch of fat fukcs themselves.

I left private school and graduated from public school... better education.  There were a lot more rules and regulations at private school.  It was heavy on the fundy Christian stuff... pretty light on the science stuff.  Had to make a change... had to.

I always assumed it was because you couldn't handle real school.

I think it depends on the ban on bringing lunches, I agree with the idea of providing more food for athletes, and the ban on bringing lunches in I will reject immediatly, considering allergies and such. The problem is most of the people throw-out some of their food then complain about hunger, which is the dumbest thing i've heard in a while.

If the child is getting most of their nutrition from that one meal, then yes it is a concern. Otherwise 850 calories are way more than enough if you are leading the lifestyle that the vast majority of kids are. Childhood obesity is a much, much bigger problem in America than childhood hunger. I won't minimize the latter problem but let's keep things in perspective.

They're called freedom fries, not freedom carrots.

Yes, but if anychild if starving it doesn't work as a program, but noone Should starve, so I do support it.

Don't they get food stamps though?

This shouldn't be an issue. Are people so helpless these days that the state has to provide them a proper diet and ban them from bringing bagged lunches? What a sad state we are in if that's the case.

The problem is that it Is an issue, and pointing out how dumb of an issue it is shows why we have to fix it.

I think I can explain this in a way that is palatable to conservatives.

Poor people have subsidized grocery money in the form of food stamps. They are being entrusted with that money, so they are also expected to follow guidelines and actually buy healthy food instead of beer and cigarettes. Sound right?

Children are also eating heavily subsidized lunches at school everyday. So if the government is paying to feed them, shouldn't the students also be required to eat food that follows standard nutrition guidelines?

Bottom line, don't complain about your freedom to eat junkfood if you want the government to subsidize your junkfood.

But hey, let's keep it in perspective, folks! I thought Romney and the GOP wanted this campaign to be about big issues and big ideas! Is that what they actually care about most these days?

Hey look, those clever kids made another video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-o99C0ezXIQ

You seem to be missing the point. This isn't a matter of the appropriate caloric intake of the meal itself. More to the point, regulations and health standards on school lunches have made the food almost entirely unpalatable. The last order of french fries I ate from school were baked and contained neither trans fats or salt. They were slimy, chewy, and completely devoid of any nourishment. I wouldn't accept $1.50 to eat that poison, much less surrender a $1.50 of my own to eat it. These kids aren't getting enough to eat at school because their options are either ~800 calories of disgusting pseudo-food or nothing. 90% my school stopped buying lunch in the cafeteria, to combat this problem they banned off-campus lunch. So it continues...


There was a very bright naturalist from the 1800s that had this idea about natural selection...

Put simply, childhood obesity is only a collective problem if you subscribe to the belief that we should be responsible for one another's health and health care, which I do not. I do, however, believe that the government has a place in raising awareness, which is the key to any desired social change.

Ex. The percentage of people who smoke cigarettes is down, particularly among younger people. We didn't accomplish this by intentionally and unconstitutionally inflating the price of tobacco products. No, we spent 15 years telling children that "smoking is gross, and makes you smell bad, and makes you slow, and no one will like you, and you'll get in trouble, and you'll get addicted, and you'll eventually wither up and die!". There were PSAs everywhere, D.A.R.E. would come to your school and talk about the evils of tobacco for hours on end, they'd show you rotting lungs, people with holes in their throat, all varieties of cancer-ridden horror. You'd be a sick bastard to want to smoke after that trip.

Would this model really be so difficult to port over to the obesity crisis? Start writing the animated commercials, make the messages easy to digest: "Over-eating will make you unattractive and snobby, moralistic cool kids on skateboards won't want to be your friend if you try and share your sandwich". Boot up a coalition of under-worked, over-paid police officers to talk to young people about the dangers of obesity; make sure the name is something innocent, but only vaguely related to the function it serves like: "Leveraging the Aesthetic Rewards of Dieting" (L.A.R.D). Print the posters and plaster the hallways of every school in America: BIG is BAD! FAT is FAIL!

Naturally, this program will probably eat into countless hours of valuable science, math, art, and history studies...but that is a small price to pay to ensure that our children know the grave truth lurking beneath the milk of their Captain Crunch. What is our alternative, trusting the parents?

Or maybe the government can screw off and go back to doing what it does best, nothing.

The first part of your post amuses me. So you want an excess of salt and saturated fats on your food? That's the problem dude! I can't vouch for the quality of the ingrediets (probably the same sh**tty quality as ever) but baking French fries is the right move. And you said they were chewy...that means its full of fiber, something else Americans don't eat enough of. Eating healthy food is never going to be an enjoyable experience. Our brains just aren't wired that way. We want quick calories, fats, refined sugars etc because that would help us survive in the wild. We don't live in the wild anymore, we live in a society of excess.

I completely agree about the comparison with tobacco. But still selling unhealthy food in the cafeteria while telling kids to eat healthy is akin to stocking vending machines with cigarettes on campus while giving DARE speeches on how bad cigarettes are.

You have yet to make a case for why this should be a collective standard and not something that you can practice individually. Besides this, you are again missing the point - do you believe it's better for kids to eat nothing because they can't stomach the healthy options at school than to have less healthy options that they would enjoy eating?

Furthermore, you sunk your own argument here.

You are advocating that people fight what their body craves naturally in order for them to be more aesthetically pleasing or cheaper on the Medicare/ER bill. You don't care what makes people, individuals happy, you seem to believe it is a secondary concern so long as our nation has a respectable mean BMI. That is fascism, plain and simple.

School lunches in America, although I have only tried them once in my life, are terrible. They're barely edible to begin with. I can only imagine what happens after you switch to "healthy options".

American food/health culture is stupid. Stupid. Stupid. Stupid. Stupid.

Especially this obsession with "healthy foods". American culture basically tells people that they should either resign themselves to a lifetime of eating disgusting food or a lifetime of horrible obesity.

If you stop compulsively snacking (which is common in the USA) and eat reasonable portion sizes, you can basically eat anything. French food tends to be extremely fatty. Most Japanese food that people actually eat is a mixture of empty calories, fried foods, and alcohol. Real Chinese food can actually be worse than American Chinese food. But portion sizes are smaller. And that really makes all the difference.

I also guess people walk more. America also sets this dichotomy between "lol ur either a super jock or you never move". Which is how you get people who drive to the gym. And I can't help but noticing the huge percentage of Americans (mostly women) who will take the elevator to get from floor 1 to floor 2. Quite annoying when you're trying to get to floor 7.

The Japanese poster is right. The problem in the USA isn't so much the food than the quantities.
In USA, for some reason, servings in restaurants are awlays bigger than elsewhere.

The problem is than they eat too much and are relying too much on cars to move.

Every single objective data point indicates the average US kid is getting too many calories.  Let's not rewrite reality to fit our political points.  Okay?

Free market capitalism.

Really if you are making an omelet how much of the bill you charge the customer is comprised of the cost of the eggs?  The answer is a sliver.  It literally costs you pennies to toss in two more eggs.  The customer gets a huge omelet and they declare your restaurant the best.  The restaurant down the street sees this and and spends a few pennies and makes their omelet bigger.  It's an arms race.  The end result is a fat American populace that has no clue what true serving sizes are.  The idea that free market capitalism solves all problems is childish preschool drivel.

I heard one estimate that McDonald's makes the best margins on french fries and cokes.  In the US cokes are delivered as a relatively cheap syrup.  The restaurant then mixes the syrup with carbonated water and sells the sludge at a ridiculous markup.  They have such huge margins on that stuff they can afford to make the cups bigger and bigger.  Again the American consumer is left with a totally out of whack notion of what is appropriate.

Talking of McDonald's, in the rest of the world, the servings are smaller there.

I've been to McDonald's in multiple countries.  In Europe an adult male will order a small coke and a hamburger from the Euro menu and call it lunch.  That is very normal outside the United States of Obesity.  Americans have no clue about serving sizes.


Do you have any objective proof of this or is this something that was pulled from your buttocks just to shore up a shaky partisan point?

No one forces you to eat everything on your plate. That's absolutely ridiculous. I can't even fathom finishing everything on my plate in an American restaurant. That's practically an eating contest. Which I'm actually pretty good at, but that's besides the point.

In the end, you get more food for less money in the United States. And it's the individual who decides how much they want to eat. Making food more expensive doesn't solve anything. If portion sizes were smaller, all you'd get are people who pad their meals with appetizers and desserts. It's like saying we can solve internet addiction simply by making internet service plans more expensive. It's rigmarole.

It's a cultural problem. This idea that the evil corporations are conspiring to make people fat is just typical anti-corporate conspiratorial thinking. Especially considering that people from the two societies in the world with the most powerful corporate lobbies, Japan and South Korea, are much thinner.

I actually love American McDonalds. I can get an extremely quick and reasonably large meal for $2. It's pretty great. Buying anything outside of the dollar menu is for suckers.

Nobody floated that strawman except you.

Yeah, I've never heard that one actually put forth.  They're conspiring to make money, which is what corporations do.  If they knew they'd pull in twice the profit by having low calorie veggie burgers instead, they'd do it in a heartbeat.  It's about the money.

My concern is when they violate laws as a "business decision" (when the risk is lower) to make that money, which corporations do frequently.  But I see no back-room conspiracies going on with McDonalds.

Even taking money out of the equation, I would still support this wholeheartedly. We do need to eat better as a nation and exercise more. It is hard to do but must be encouraged at all steps of the way. I wouldn't force anyone though. I think your school is wrong in not letting people go outside for lunch. It it is right in having a healthy menu. Life requires sacrifice, hopefully something you kids will learn soon.

And by "charter high school" you mean you didn't have to leave your house and did all your work on a computer...

According to the Daily Show, which I'm assuming is accurate, you can go over the 850 calorie limit with fruits and vegetables, so that takes care of that "problem."  Not to mention there's surely no policing of students trading food items between each other at the tables.

Leave it to Republicans to politicize and oppose giving students healthier lunches...

I just read the rest of the thread (I was really busy this morning) and the point raised about portion sizes is an excellent one. Not only do we new to stop eating crappy food, we really need to stop eating so much of it. And speaking of restaurants, putting a crap ton of salt in everything is the new thing to do. It gets people hypertensive rather than fat, so they don't care, and the food still tastes good to our brain wired for a life in the wild.

See, I think that's part of the problem. This drive to stop people from eating "crappy food". When it's not really the healthiness of the food that's the main problem. All this guiltfest that tries to get people to eat food that they don't actually want to eat just causes people to tune the whole thing out.

Also, I never found American food to be that heavy in salt. Even with the extra salt they throw into things. Just because Americans don't seem to be very heavy on pickled/fermented foods and other delicious sources of sodium.

Eat whatever you want. I'll dispense your lisinopril, metformin and simvastatin when you need it.

Ugh, I guess I should elaborate. I'm not saying that a steak is crappy food, I'm talking about wisconsin style buttery hamburgers and fries doused with salt. And even then if you make it at home, it's likely to be more healthy than if you buy it at a restaurant. I don't blame the restaurants, they are just trying to get more business. It just pisses me off more because of my personal situation I suppose. I just don't have time to cook at home and there are basically no healthy options out there. Everything either has too little fiber, too much fat or too much salt. Your best option is just to pick something that does not complete the trifecta.

So kids complaining because they have healthy options just strikes me as being silly and well...childish.