Almost barfed today listening to CKNW interview a woman from Toronto and a professor from Edmonton who have been successful in banishing food from school cafeterias. Canadian students are lining up by the 10’s for the top seller, bean curd, textured vegetable protein with a side of free range grass. Sales have collapsed but no worries, English and Science have been dropped from the curriculum. They found a slot between global warming 6.0 and the vital importance of of Jack’s beliefs 101 to indoctri…., er teach the little bolsheviks what they have eat to prepare them for their non-profit job.
School Lunches: New Nutrition Guidelines
“Our contractors have said that they’re anticipating huge revenue losses — some are anticipating as much as a 35 per cent [drop],” she says. “Pointing out that rural schools, where kids don’t have the option of nearby fast-food outlets, are generally much more profitable than urban ones.”
Want to Live Forever? Eat Chocolate
Eating more of it gives you one-third less risk of heart disease, and nearly a 30 percent decreased risk of stroke. By comparison, exercising regularly (rather than sitting on your butt all day, every day) only lowers your risk of heart disease by 45 percent.
I didn’t hear the interview you mentioned, and couldn’t find a link to it, but I did read the article. I’m not sure why anyone would quarrel with the schools’ attempts to provide nutritional food in their cafeterias and to try to wean students from their high fat, sodium and sugar diets. (There was no mention of tofu and grass in the article.) Students do have the alternative to head out to the nearest Fatburger for their lunches but that doesn’t mean schools should be competing with these establishments. And rural students…well, if they don’t like the cafeteria offerings, they could pack a lunch like I, and probably you, did.
Two words:
Brown Bag!
I read the article, and their claims that kids stopped going off site after the first month was a joke. Look, a month into school the weather isn’t great and the kids are lazy, so they will eat anything!! It would probably be healthier for most of these kids to have to walk off campus to get a snack.
Don’t eat food, it’s bad for you!
What barren, terrible, places schools must be these days.
My solace then was the chilled sensuous richness of the Swedish Milkshake machine.
It comforted me through those rough times just like a sympathetic bartender who knew me by name.
.
Meat and cheeze are some of the most nutritious foods around. So, if school cafeterias were interested in serving healthy food, they would serve bison burgers without the bun. Solution to fat kids, ban parents from driving them to school. I used to walk 4 miles each way to high school. I lived far enough away that I was eligible for free bus tickets, but I liked to walk and sold my bus tickets to other students and used the money to buy slices of pie in the cafeteria. It wasn’t until I hit about age 25 or so that I finally was able to put on some weight.
Also, make physical education mandatory and bring back some of the drill-sargent type of physed teachers we used to have in high school. They made damn sure that everyone was getting their full hour of exercise during the class. If there are fat kids around, it means that food is too cheap and they need to get off their asses.
As far as low salt, 5% of the population requires increased amounts of salt as they are heterozygotes for the cystic fibrosis gene and sweat out far more salt than those without the gene. In a province as hot as southern Ontario, removing salt from the school diet is medically unsound, especially if the kids are exercising hard. Also, salt and hypertension are weakly linked. I’m sure that the insulin dependent diabetic kids really appreciate the lack of sugar containing drinks if they have a hypoglycemic episode – what’s a little hypoglycemic brain damage from a kid seizing until the paramedics show up; what’s important is making sure that everyone eats the same politically correct diet.
Another very nutritious food item is peanut butter and quite cheap. Nuts are also great sources of protein. I never ate salads when I was a kid (those plants didn’t grow in northern Alberta) and I view fruit as just expensive candy bars. Instead of potato chips, have vending machines dispense pork rinds which are very tasty and highly nutritious for growing kids. Also, they tend to be quite filling unlike carbs which people can eat in huge amounts and excess carbs are turned straight into fat.
I eat in the hospital cafeteria as they serve hamburgers although I’ve had a few doctors get onto me about the lack of vegetables in my diet. I figure the most efficient way of eating vegetables is to let ruminants eat them for me and concentrate the nutrients in their muscle tissue.
Peanut butter and nuts in general are not allowed in our kids school. I think there is a kid in the school who is allergic that we have to watch out for. Pop is totally out, yet Sunny d is allowed? I am waiting for the bread ban because there is a Celiac kid in the school somewhere that might steal one of my kid’s ham sandwiches. And how long before ham is banned out of pure PC?
Isn’t Mum supposed to make your lunch? Oh sorry I was being so non-inclusive, isn’t Mum or one of your two dads or Dad’s current squeeze or one of Dad’s four wives or a relative or whatever non-related adult rattling around the house this week who’s supposed to be minding the child-units meant to be making the kid’s lunch?
…
And can’t kids make their own damn lunch? Or did Mum/Dad/Other parent-like creature drink up all the food money again?
This will continue unabated until enough “Law Enforcement” rot where they belong. For once again, it is THEY who enable these “Leaders” to get away with this.
Life can be so simple and pleasant if one sticks to the most important rule. If it tastes good –eat it. If not — leave it alone. Other hints… Vegetables ?, hell…when have you ever seen a rabbit live to 10. Getting fat ?, start smoking. Need exercise ?, eat a bar of exlax every morning. Worried about your health?. ….don’t cause you’ll die anyway and the only thing that will kill you before your time is worrying about what might kill you in the first place. Disregard anything you hear from health canada because they revise it so often you will never keep up.
Never ever see a doctor if you feel fine. That’s like taking your car to a garage and having it checked out. They will always find something that probably wasn’t there. (When doctors go on strike the death rate of the populace drops significantly). Never forget that 50% of all doctors come from the bottom of their class. Yours is probably one of them. The words “practice of medicine” alone should scare the hell out of you. Practice ??.
There you go. Follow this simple formula and life to a ripe old age of at least 40 after which you will start going down hill no matter what you do.
@ loki
The hype about salt is interesting and controversial with varied “expert” opinions.
http://www.health-report.co.uk/sodium_chloride_salt_myths1.html
peterj, thanks for that link which is something I’ll use to bash some of the natrophobic physicians I have dealings with. Just as cholesterol is weakly correlated with heart disease, I now see people who eat too little salt and end up in hospital.
When I was an intern, a sure way to flunk an internal medicine rotation was to tell a particular internist that low serum sodium was reflective of total body sodium deficiency – too bad I no longer have any dealings with him as I would have loved to confront him with the heterozygote cystic fibrosis data and the measured salt losses of football players exercising in summer conditions in the SE US. I kept finding patients for whom the only explanation for their hyponatremia was that they ate too little salt.
Where I practice now is hot and dry in the summer and, every summer I have elderly patients who come in weak and dizzy with low blood pressure and feel rotten. As soon as I put them on a high salt diet, they feel much better. They’ve been brainwashed with the statist anti-salt propaganda that tells them salt is bad. After I do a vigorous workout when the temperature is >100 F outside I have an intense craving for salty food which is my bodies way of telling me to replace salt. I photographed a black T-shirt of mine which had a rather large salt ring on it after a particularly intense exercise session.
The only people who really do need to be salt restricted are people with congestive heart failure as here increasing salt in the diet will increase fluid retention – have a patient in hospital now who overindulged in processed food at a wedding and retained a massive amount of fluid. These people are the exceptions and, yes, there are some people with salt-sensitive hypertension but they are not common in Canada.
OTOH, I find processed food has far too much salt in it for my liking and only have a craving for it in the summer. The best solution is to have low salt and regular salt food available so that people can find the right balance for themselves. (One exception is salt and tequila which go well together in any season).
When a 350 lb patient waddles into my office, the amount of salt in their diet is one of the least of my concerns.
@ loki
Love your logic. Wish you were my doctor. Here’s one more for your salt ammo pile.
http://news.ca.msn.com/top-stories/go-ahead-shake-it-we-may-be-wrong-about-salt