Heartbreaking documentary on Amazon Prime that a friend told me about. I don’t know how long it’s been up there. But kids are clearly are suffering the worst. If I had a kid public schools where they had this kind of food being served, I’d be up in arms. If this isn’t reason enough to become a low-carb evangelist I don’t know what is. https://www.amazon.com/Fed-Up-Katie-Couric/dp/B00MRHFA72
ETA - swapped out the link to a link that nonsubscribers to Prime can see
It’s about money. Carbs are cheap. Protein is expensive. Taxpayers don’t want to fund public schools fully already even for basic education, let alone school lunches.
When there is food aid sent to starving people, it’s rice, flour, and beans, not steak and eggs.
I can’t watch the video because I am not an Amazon Prime customer.
Part of it is allowing fast food companies in school lunch rooms, selling soda and candy. Schools have a deal with the devil. Consider the reason carbs are so cheap is because the government subsidizes them. It’s also about advertising to kids, about all the misinformation out there, about the increase in added sugars about the big food industry. And one young teen in Houston profiled ends up having to have bariatric surgery. His parents are so defeated in what they feel like they can do about the issue and it’s heartbreaking.
It’s free to watch if you have Amazon Prime, but I think you can rent it from Amazon if you don’t have a prime account.
Also about money. Let the big corporations come in and make a profit off the kids, schools either get paid for the privilege, or at least don’t have to prepare and serve food to the kids.
I view Amazon as an online retail superpredator, doing to on-line retailers what Wal-Mart did to smaller retail brick and mortar stores, so I don’t do business with them. Not that they notice or care what I do, but it matters to me.
The difference between them and Walmart is that Walmart got crazy tax incentives from local governments to come in and put mom and pops out of business. The one similarity you can say about Amazon is that for a long time they didn’t have to charge sales tax, but they do now so I don’t know that I would compare the two. They are offering a service (home delivery) that other retailers don’t necessarily. But if you don’t want to patronize them, that’s your business. The doc is almost 5 years old so it may be available on another streaming service.
I work at an elementary school and we can’t (not that we want to) sell soda and candy. Lunches are crap because they follow federal student lunch guidelines, which follow federal nutrition guidelines. Low fat, low salt, calorie-restricted with plenty of carbs.
Back in the dark ages when I started teaching, schools had kitchens and the lunch ladies made actual food (not low carb, but fresh cooked food like mom would make). Then the federal government decided the needed more involvement and mandated all school lunches have precise numbers of this and that with severe limits on fat and salt. It became hard to cook fresh food, but lookie… processed food manufacturers stepped in to fill the void with frozen, packaged stuff with all the ‘counts’ right on the box.
No school (that I have seen) built since the 90s even has a real kitchen. Just giant warming ovens they can warm the plastic-wrapped trays that come from the central ‘kitchen.’
High schools have snack bars and do things differently, but in elementary school at least we are not selling anything but the government-mandated junk.
The states may tack on their own restrictions, but the real control is the federal student lunch guidelines.
https://schoolnutrition.org/aboutschoolmeals/schoolnutritionstandards/
Yes. I understand that. My comment was regarding soda and fast food in the schools.
I will watch this, with a little skepticism, I see Michael Pollan is in it, the “In Defense of Food” guy who pushed the “Eat Whole Foods, mostly plants, not too much” philosophy. Ketoized it should read,
“Eat Whole Foods, mostly meat and fat, just till you reach satiety.”
They interview him briefly. But I am with you on the misguided “In Defense of Food.” I went from 260 to 269 in a month after reading his book years ago. It was right after that I cut grain from my diet because I was so desperate!
This makes me feel so lucky that our local public(!) schools all have kitchens where the meals are cooked fresh every day and also have great salad bars for kids to make up their own meals if they don’t like the hot option. I don’t know what I will do if we leave our current town.
This might sound insensitive but it is The Penal System. I have spent a fair amount of time in Asia and if you think the food given is unhealthy here in many countries if your family isn’t supplying some money or food you can literally starve to death. At least we’re feeding them enough to eat on our tab. If you want better food stay out of trouble. Our prisons are like a country club compared to most of the world. I’m pretty sure they’d complain even more about a ketogenic diet without those carb heavy foods they complain about now. 
Pack a healthy lunch?
I always packed lunch at school. I regret that it was alway a sandwich and in my early years sometimes peanut butter and fluffernutter. I cringe at this now.
Foods that can cause agitation in a lot of the population. Just what we need for people sitting in jail. 
There are plenty of people that are not guilty that get hauled off to jail for one reason or another. Considering that a lot of people end up in jail and prison because of poor impulse control, it would be a godsend to have prisoners on something like Keto, it might help them change in a way that benefits all of society.
I have often thought the changing dietary recommendations are why we have seen an increase in school shootings. Guns have always been available. But people didn’t start going postal until the 80s and suddenly in the 90s we had school shootings and the are steadily increasing. Take a look at mass shooters and they all have the tell tale signs of systemic inflammation. Either puffy faces or severe acne. I know before the change in my diet I would easily become agitated. My agitation didn’t manifest itself in violence, but can see how it might in others.
Prisoners are people too and you know what goes up in cost when they eat a crappy diet? Their health care costs. Health care in the US is insanely expensive, even on the government’s dime. The state would save more in health-care costs than it would spend on healthy foods for prisoners.
Yeah, yeah. I would if I needed to. But having this simple thing out of my worries about the 5 million things I do for my kids every day plus my full-time job taking care of other people makes a difference.
Yes it certainly happens, but about the school shootings I am quicker to blame media desensitization of our youth before sugar and carbs, after all killing is so cool in video games and movies! I grew up on that junk food in the 60’s and school violence was pretty much limited to fist fighting behind the gym.