The government is threatening to fine schools for not following Michelle’s child-abusive lunch program.
I wonder if someone could file a lawsuit demanding to see the science behind her recommendations? Because there is none.
12 thoughts on “The Imperial First Lady”
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I left them this comment:
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The science behind the guidelines is garbage. That’s a long subject involving how US nutrition studies have been conducted for decades (a topic currently bouncing around in the journals), but it’s simpler to go look at the school lunch menus from the 1940’s, 1950’s, and 1960’s and then look at the period childhood obesity rates.
The guidelines also would have us believe that an 80-pound female freshman bookworm and a 300-pound senior linebacker being recruited by Alabama have the same caloric requirements.
The program is teaching children to despise the federal government and disrespect the law, and lessons taught through biting hunger are never forgotten, sometimes for several generations, as happened during the Great Depression.
And the program is trying to fix the wrong problem. If you want to know what’s causing the obesity epidemic, compare a national or worldwide map of antibiotic prescriptions per capita with a map of obesity.
Hint: It’s the same map. Utah prescribes almost no antibiotics at all and has almost no obesity. The South and Midwest are the opposite. Mexicans prescribe far more antibiotics than Canadians and have much higher obesity rates.
Since obesity doesn’t cause bacterial infections, and since their is an obvious correlation between antibiotic per capita prescription rates and obesity rates, the antibiotics are the likely cause of the obesity.
For temporal evidence, look at pictures of VE day in Manhattan, or Woodstock (or nice charts of obesity rates over time). There are almost no fat people anywhere to be seen in young people prior to the 1970’s. The age cohorts born after the Woodstock crowd (born post Korean War) are the ones who started routinely getting penicillin in early childhood. As time went on parents in some regions began asking for antibiotics even for viral infections, and in some regions doctors would prescribe it, thinking it did no harm. Those regions are now full of fat people.
Recent mouse studies confirm that even small doses of penicillin given to baby mice alters both the gut flora and lifelong metabolic rate. Starving school kids isn’t going to fix that, nor is making them hate the Democrat party in a pointless and futile effort to impose menus that would cause prison riots a wise course of action.
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I figured that if I said the program was causing children to despise Democrats they might actually change course. It is, after all, the party of freebies.
George, you come off as a total crank. Cite links to papers next time. You can complain about credentialism and you can complain about peer review, but, at best, life isn’t fair, and at worst, your complaints are silly, and either way, you’re going to come off as a crank unless you cite journal articles.
That said, I never heard of your crazy-sounding antibiotic theory, so I googled it, and I was mildly surprised to see that some people who probably know more about biology and medicine than you do actually take it seriously. So, thanks for the introduction to the topic.
There is a lot of evidence that we’ve been overmucking with our digestion, and that probiotics can help restore the intestinal fauna. But the federal dietary guidelines are scientifically atrocious as well. Michelle’s lunch program is literally child abuse.
Since we don’t know which bacteria and yeast prevent obesity (if it is true at all), I guess this is where poo transplants would help. Eat poo, don’t get fat. Icky but interesting.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fecal_bacteriotherapy
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Clarifying: I was guessing that typical probiotics won’t help if they don’t have the right bacteria.
And I don’t see anyone who agrees with George that diet isn’t the primary culprit – the people I’m finding on the web who take the antibiotic issue seriously still say it is a minor cause compared to diet.
If you’ve been paying attention to the science, you know, real science, you’d understand that the human gut biome is one of the most cutting edge fields out there. For example, the gut produces much of our seratonin. Bacteria is responsible for all sorts of nutrient absorption. Antibiotics destroy good bacteria as well as the bad bacteria. And when the good bacteria is gone, problems develop. Look at the success of fecal transplants.
Before calling people cranks, you might want to actually do research on it. Here’s a start: http://www.marksdailyapple.com/7-things-you-had-no-idea-gut-bacteria-could-do/#axzz44PhVTtEA
I didn’t call him a crank, I told him that he would come off as (eg “be perceived as”) a crank if he didn’t cite journal articles when leaving a comment at the federalregister.gov site where no one has heard of him.
Or the states and school districts could decline the money and the strings that come with it.
I won’t blame antibiotics (those generations that did not receive them also died from bacterial infections that are barely a note in medical textbooks these days).
But another answer can be found by searching youtube for 1960’s physical education. I doubt many of the most buff military operators could routinely make some of those moves..
The Feds took my chicken tenders away this winter (though they did sneak back briefly at the end of the winter season in mid to late February). I work at Yellowstone National Park and eat in a company cafeteria all the time. The cafeteria menu had to be shuffled a bit to be “healthier” and one of the sacrifices were the chicken tenders. Several employees are of the opinion that it was due to the Michelle Obama initiative. I .tried tracing it down and came to this:
While they speak here of visitor-facing businesses, it also holds for employee-side dining.