(from Bloomberg Businessweek) In 2010, the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act, backed by the Obama administration, rewrote nutrition standards for the $13.6 billion National School Lunch Program. Those standards required more fruits, vegetables and whole grains, and lower sodium levels. Chocolate milk, if served, had to be fat-free. The rules did increase nutrition up to 30 percent, but put a dent in big dairy's profits, especially for products like American cheese and milk, and also upset school lunch administrators, who were frustrated with declining consumption of school meals.
Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Perdue, a grain mogul and former milk-industry consultant, rolled back those regulations in 2017, and school meals are changing again. The new rules cut the Obama-era whole-grain targets in half and called off the big reduction in sodium. A smaller cut is planned to start in the 2024-25 school year, potentially the end of President Trump’s second term. The American Heart Association was among several groups of doctors to publish letters opposing the changes. The Center for Science in the Public Interest said that by 2020 the difference in sodium consumption for high schoolers will be the equivalent of almost two Big Macs a week.
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