USDA To Reverse Michelle Obama's Efforts To Make School Food Healthier

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USDA To Reverse Healthier School Food Standards

The U.S. Department of Agriculture is looking to undo the hard work done by Michelle Obama, who made it her mission to make America’s kids healthier. They’re doing so by proposing a reverse on stricter nutritional standards for school breakfasts and lunches.

Not only that, they made this announcement on the former First Lady’s birthday.

According to reports from MSN, the USDA presented new rules for the Food and Nutrition Service that would tentatively permit schools to reduce the amount of fruits and vegetables in school meal requirements and instead sell more fries, pizza, and burgers.

The USDA claims that these changes will be the answer to unforeseen issues that happened as a result of Obama’s regulations. But, Colin Schwartz, deputy director of legislative affairs for Center for Science in the Public Interest, told MSN that these proposed rules could “create a huge loophole in school nutrition guidelines, paving the way for children to choose pizza, burgers, french fries and other foods high in calories, saturated fat or sodium in place of balanced school meals every day.”

These new rules would allow schools to cut daily servings of fruit with breakfast in half. At lunch, the USDA’s rules permit schools to offer potatoes as a vegetable every single day.

With these new rules, the USDA is essentially nullifying the positive news from a report published last year.  assessing school meals after the implementation of Michelle Obama’s Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act.

“The Healthy, Hunger Free Kids Act of 2010 has been called one of the most important obesity-prevention policy achievements in recent decades,” Schwartz told MSN. “Yet the Trump administration seems intent on sabotaging it. While there’s plenty of room to strengthen school nutrition further, these proposals taken together instead are basically aiming a flamethrower at it.”

The U.S. Department of Agriculture administers nutritional programs that feed almost 30 million students at 99,000 schools.