Fighting obesity

Posted on December 4, 2010 by Michael

Laziness and greed are cloaked in “liberty” and “freedom” by fundamentally stupid and effectively bad people like Sarah Palin and many of her fellow Republicans, but sometimes pragmatic, common-sense ideas are still able to break through the bullshit.

US lawmakers on Thursday passed a 4.5-billion-dollar bill that will give more US kids school meals and let the government set child nutrition guidelines.

The bill pledges 4.5 billion dollars over 10 years to child nutrition programs, increases the reimbursement paid to schools by the federal government for free meals provided to children, and expands access to school lunches and after-school meals.

It also allows the US Department of Agriculture to set nutrition guidelines for foods sold in schools, including in coin-operated vending machines, and provides money for school gardens and farm-to-school programs.

The most common legitimate objection to this bill is that it might not help in the fight to keep kids from getting fat and disgusting. But a quick look at the facts ought to remove such an objection: Most kids are going to eat between 160-180 lunches a year at school. They’re going to eat a total of about 1100 meals a year. That’s (conservatively) about 15% of a kid’s meals every year. I would say that making those 160-180 meals healthy is a good and it will make a notable difference. And if that wasn’t enough goodness, this bill also provides for kids who otherwise go without or, at best, with something even less healthy than the shitty Lunchables every other kid gets for lunch.

Or we could just be polemic assholes and feed them plates of cookies, a la Palin.

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Republicans and being just a little fat

Posted on December 2, 2010 by Michael

In my daily news trawl, I came across two articles listed right next to each other. Here’s the first:

House Republicans have temporarily blocked legislation to feed school meals to thousands more hungry children.

Republicans used a procedural maneuver Wednesday to try to amend the $4.5 billion bill, which would give more needy children the opportunity to eat free lunches at school and make those lunches healthier. First lady Michelle Obama has lobbied for the bill as part of her “Let’s Move” campaign to combat childhood obesity.

…

Former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin has also taken a swipe at the first lady’s campaign, bringing cookies to a speech at a Pennsylvania school last month and calling the campaign a “school cookie ban debate” and “nanny state run amok” on her Twitter feed.

It has been abundantly clear for a long, long time that Sarah Palin is intellectually inferior to most people. I really don’t see how this can even be debated. But it hasn’t always been clear that she’s also just a bad person. Now it is.

Now, if she was scientifically literate, maybe this second article would have an impact on her thinking:

The latest research involving about 1.5 million people concluded that healthy white adults who were overweight were 13 percent more likely to die during the time they were followed in the study than those whose weight is in an ideal range.

“Having a little extra meat on your bones — if that meat happens to be fat — is harmful, not beneficial,” said Dr. Michael Thun of the American Cancer Society, senior author of the study.

The study’s conclusions, published in Thursday’s New England Journal of Medicine, are similar to three other large studies, said the lead author, Amy Berrington of the National Cancer Institute.

“Now there’s really a very large body of evidence which supports the finding that being overweight is associated with a small increased risk of death,” Berrington said.

This is what I’m talking about when I say human beings are more important than the abstract ethical principle of liberty. Letting kids get fat is going to have real world consequences that no one wants. Human lives matter.

But kids do like cookies.

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