| The problem with potatoes is that kids like them too much and schools serve them all the time in order to comply with the vegetable requirement in the school lunch program. The 2005 Dietary Guidelines for Americans, however, recommended eating a variety of vegetables daily and throughout the week.
Here's what those guidelines say:
Consume a sufficient amount of fruits and vegetables while staying within energy needs. Two cups of fruit and 2½ cups of vegetables per day are recommended for a reference 2,000-calorie intake, with higher or lower amounts depending on the calorie level.
Choose a variety of fruits and vegetables each day. In particular, select from all five vegetable subgroups (dark green, orange, legumes, starchy vegetables, and other vegetables) several times a week.
In order to align with those guidelines, the new school meal rules drafted by the Institute of Medicine, and embraced by the USDA, proposed limiting potatoes and other starchy vegetables such as corn, peas and lima beans to no more than 1 cup per week, and increasing the portions of dark green and orange vegetables and legumes.
That touched off a storm of protest from the potato industry, as well as numerous congressmen, who wrote the USDA demanding that the potato restriction be removed in the final rule. Last week's drubbing of the USDA process came in the form of an amendment to the 2012 agriculture spending measure jointly proposed by two senators from potato growing states, Susan Collins, Republican of Maine, and Mark Udall, Democrat of Colorado.
Collins and others argued the nutrition benefits of potatoes, suggesting schools should simply remove fatty french fries. Proponents of the new rule repeated the call for more vegetable variety in school meals. Perhaps they would have gotten further if they'd pointed out that starchy spuds are not an appropriate food to be feeding children in the middle of an obesity epidemic. A recent Harvard study, which looked at the eating habits of more than 120,000 American men and women over a 20-year period, found that potatoes more than any other food were associated with excess weight gain, regardless of whether they are fried, boiled or baked.
In fact, a growing body of scientific evidence suggests that obesity is not caused solely by a failure to burn off all the calories consumed, but by the metabolic effects of eating too many carbohydrates, especially highly glycemic carbs such as potatoes, refined grains and sugar.
The Senate action represents a naked display of agricultural interests and political emotion trumping the science around kids health. So I thought readers might like to see exactly what was motivating members of the Institute of Medicine committee when they wrote their 380-page report, first released in October 2009, proposing the school meal nutrition guidelines the Senate has now tossed overboard.
Here's what the committee said:
The overall goal was the development of a set of well-conceived and practical recommendations for nutrients and Meal Requirements that reflect current nutrition science, increase the meals' contents of key food groups, improve the ability of the school meal programs to meet the nutritional needs of children, foster healthy eating habits, and safeguard children's health.
In recognition of the need to update and revise the Nutrition Standards and Meal Requirements for the school meal programs, Congress incorporated requirements in the 2004 Child Nutrition and WIC6 Reauthorization Act (P.L. 108-265). In particular, the act requires USDA to issue guidance and regulations to promote the consistency of the standards for school meal programs with the standards provided in the most recent Dietary Guidelines for Americans...
Among the changes needed to improve consistency with the 2005 edition of Dietary Guidelines for Americans are the following:
* Increasing the emphasis on food groups to encourage a healthier food consumption pattern, especially by offering variety and a larger amount of fruits and vegetables, and by offering whole grains as a substitute for some refined grains, and
* Limiting the intake of saturated fat, trans fat, cholesterol, added sugars, and salt by offering foods such as fat-free (skim) milk or low-fat milk, fewer sweetened foods, and foods with little added salt.
Charge to the Committee
* Specify a planning model for school meals (including targets for intake) as it may relate to nutrients and other dietary components for breakfast and lunch.
* Recommend revisions to the Nutrition Standards and, in consideration of the appropriate age-grade groups for schoolchildren, provide the calculations that quantify the amounts of nutrients and other dietary components specified in the Nutrition Standards.
* Recommend the Meal Requirements necessary to implement the Nutrition Standards on the basis of the two existing types of menu planning approaches (i.e., the food-based menu planning [FBMP] approach and the nutrient-based menu planning [NBMP] approach). The Meal Requirements are to include
o standards for a food-based reimbursable meal by identifying
+ the food components for as offered and as served meals and
+ the amounts of food items per reimbursable meal by age-grade groups and
o standards for a nutrient-based reimbursable meal by identifying
+ the menu items for as offered and as served and
+ the 5-day average amounts of nutrients and other dietary components per meal.
* Illustrate the practical application of the revised Nutrition Standards and Meal Requirements by developing 4 weeks of menus that will meet the recommended standards for the age-grade groups. |
