Low-fat chocolate milk is back in school cafeterias and pizza is still a vegetable after changes to Obama-era nutritional guidelines from the U.S. Department of Agriculture have been made by the Trump Administration. When the rules were implemented, then-First Lady Michelle Obama heavily backed the legislation, which placed strict limitations on school lunches to push healthier diets among children to lose weight amid increasing obesity levels nationwide.
However, when they went into effect, the only thing that was lost was billions of taxpayers dollars as schoolchildren across the country dumped their unappetizing government-mandated vegetables in the garbage.
For years, students, parents, and school teachers and staff have advocated for the rescinding of the restrictions established by 2010’s Healthy and Hunger-Free Kids Act. There were limits placed on total calories, portions, fat, sugar, sodium, and whole grain contents. Although the U.S. government created waivers on things such as events and food sales, it left cafeteria-goers disappointed and hungry.
Spokeswoman for the School Nutrition Association Diane Pratt-Heavner said in an interview with AP that since the implementation of the Obama-era restrictions, there have been regional disagreements with the provided courses.
“Finding whole-grain biscuits and grits that students like are a challenge in the U.S. South, while tortillas are a challenge in the Southwest,” she said, adding that nearly two million fewer kids are eating school lunch each day since the rules took effect.
Though, Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue said days ago that the White House is scrapping the unnecessary bureaucracy altogether by making many of the Trump Administration’s previous rule changes permanent, effectively erasing rules that some believe unfairly targeted food-based cultural diversity and wasted billions in federal funding.
In all, 99,000 schools across the country will be affected by the change.
Of course, proponents of the Obama-inspired law and many on the left argue that the Trump Administration is putting the lives of millions of children in jeopardy, adding that the overhaul steers away from decades of having a national interest in health and physical fitness.
Even though the U.S. is in its 57th year of presidential fitness campaigns, Americans, for lack of a better word, are fatter than ever before.
This week, the United Health Foundation announced in its “America’s Health Rankings Annual Report” that obesity in the U.S. is at an all-time high. The obesity rate exceeds 30 percent of the adult population, up five percent in the past year (from 29.9 percent to 31.3 percent), AP reported.
Regardless of the statistics, does it really matter if people are fat – at least to the U.S. government?
The first recorded policy-based instance of this in the U.S. was in the post-WWII era.
In 1956, President Dwight D. Eisenhower created the President’s Council of Youth Fitness, the precursor to the current President’s Council on Fitness, Sports, and Nutrition, which commissions a national study to measure fitness testing in schools.
The 1953 report on which the original policy is based was conducted by the Austro-Hungarian Dr. Hans Kraus, who is interestingly the pioneer of modern rock climbing, as well as one of the founders of sports medicine and physical rehabilitation. Analysis found that the state of American fitness was in shambles, scoring very low on the international stage. “The report claimed that 56% of American children failed the fitness test, but only 8% of Europeans did,” Vox reported on the instance.
President Eisenhower, the former five-star general of the United States Army and Supreme Allied Commander, presumably, was not happy.
Although Eisenhower may have introduced a vast number of Americans to having a great physical fitness as being in the national interest, it was actually President John F. Kennedy that led on the issue to make it integral to his campaign and during his time in the Oval Office.
Commenting on the history of physical fitness being a part of the well-being of society since the days of the ancient Greeks and it being “as old as Western civilization itself,” Kennedy wrote in a 1960 Sports Illustrated article entitled “The Soft American,” that citizens were in danger of losing the tradition of realizing its full potential as a people.
Part of his bigger push against the Soviet Union during the early height of the Cold War, President Kennedy said the U.S. was battling “a powerful and implacable adversary determined to show the world that only the Communist system possesses the vigor and determination necessary to satisfy awakening aspirations for progress and the elimination of poverty and want.” He added that only a “physically fit” American public could have the determination and will to challenge such enemy.
In the later 1960s, with more and more young Americans passing fitness tests, President Lyndon B. Johnson conducted a second national fitness survey, creating the first Presidential Fitness Award that is now given to students who score above the 85th percentile on the President’s Challenge. Continued through the Nixon Administration, alterations to the program included goals to promote daily exercise, strength training, and having a more Teddy Roosevelt-esque approach to a “strenuous life.”
It wasn’t until President Ronald Reagan was inaugurated in 1981 that any major changes were made. By executive order, he created the National Fitness Foundation, a National Fitness Testing Week, and the U.S. Fitness Academy. When his vice president and successor President George H. W. Bush looked to make a change at the Council on Physical Fitness and Sports, he appointed Hollywood actor and Mr. Olympia Arnold Schwarzenegger as chairman to promote the need for personal wellness and healthy physique throughout the U.S.
Afterwards, despite his frequent trips for sausage biscuits, President Bill Clinton and his administration took the system online in the late 1990s. In 2003, for the 50th anniversary of the Eisenhower fitness proclamation, under President George W. Bush the council launched a national fitness test for adults.
Beginning with the Obama Administration, a more aggressive approach with the program was taken. With what started as the “Let’s Move!” program, the name of the council was changed to become the President’s Council on Fitness, Sports, and Nutrition. First Lady Obama was even the principal administration member working on fitness and nutritional initiatives.
The program was dedicated to solving the problem of childhood obesity in the U.S., which led to the federal school lunch program overhaul for the first time in 15 years to include healthier and more nutritious meals.
President Obama also pushed through legislation requiring restaurants with more than 20 or more chains to post their calorie counts on menus.
However, in the decades since a renewed national interest in health and physical fitness, Americans have gained weight.
Of course, the government cannot actually force anyone to get up and do jumping jacks or eat mung beans and quinoa. The council even admits to this, saying they only “promote programs and initiatives,” and “promote healthy and active lifestyles.”
So, again, does it really matter to the U.S. government if people are fat?
One can argue the economics, the healthcare consequences, federal Medicaid and Medicare spending, and any other statistics on the merits – it makes sense. Someone who eats kale all day will probably be better off than one who eats hash browns and scrapple – that is pretty obvious.
But, at least schoolchildren can eat all the pizza they want and be healthy. In all seriousness, the whole “pizza is a vegetable thing” is a bit of a misnomer. In 2011, the House Democratic Committee said, “House Republicans are ramming through legislation…to classify pizza as a ‘vegetable’ for the purpose of school lunches.”
The law does not specify pizza. That year’s Farm Bill included language that dictated one-eighth of a cup of tomato paste could suffice as a one-half serving of vegetables. In fact, despite a pinch of salt, it is actually healthier and more nutritious than one-half of a cup of apple slices served in school cafeterias.
Nevertheless, should it matter if all Americans want is cheeseburger pizza?
Maybe it’s a mark of being comfortable. After all, when Eisenhower was in office, the U.S. came off a few years service in the total war of the 1940s. As a general, presumably he would want Americans to prepare for a seemingly eventual terrible circumstance after a period of global geopolitical hegemony.
Maybe it’s a mark of the people not wanting the government meddling in their lives to figure out how much salt was on their fries. It could be that Americans just like chili dogs more than kale, and the fact that kids do not like vegetables – they never will. As the Libertarian-esque “Parks and Recreation” character Ron Swanson would say, “fish is a vegetable,” as well.
Although the government cannot and should not force people to consume certain things like organic tofu and free-range squash, it does lead to dire consequences like an obese populous or a lack of a woodsman attitude – all in the name of freedom, right?
Though, Americans could learn a lesson from a president that put his mark of what being physically fit was and how a frontiersman was made on the newly discovered plains of the near-western U.S.
In 1910, one year after leaving office, President Theodore Roosevelt delivered a speech called “Citizenship in a Republic” which, among some, would come to be known as the widely-quoted “The Man in the Arena.”
In Sorbonne in Paris, Roosevelt spoke of becoming a nation of people striving to be the best and “daring greatly.”
“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”
Although the government cannot force the American public to be physically fit and healthy, to be able to handle a strenuous life, and promote a can-do attitude, it doesn’t mean Americans don’t need to.
