Tag Archives: Let’s Move

No Parent Who Reads This Will Be Surprised By It!

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Yesterday’s U.K. Daily Mail reported that since Michelle Obama has overhauled the school lunch program, more than 1 million students have stopped buying school lunches. This has happened despite the fact that the number of students who receive free, taxpayer-subsidized lunches has risen sharply.

The article reports:

The Government Accountability Office, a watchdog agency inside the federal government, told members of Congress in a little-noticed January 28 report that participation in the school lunch program declined by 1,086,000 in that one year, the biggest drop on record.

The Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act of 2010 directed the U.S. Department of Agriculture to revise its school lunch standards to bring them in line with a new set of nutrition requirements.

The first lady rolled out the law’s final regulations in January 2012 with a presentation linked to her ‘Let’s Move!‘ children’s health initiative. Changes took effect that fall. In the ensuing nine months, 33 states cited ‘challenges with palatability – food that tasted good to students’ as one reason sales tumbled.

It is not news to any parent that an unsupervised child is not going to eat food he does not like. If Mrs. Obama truly wanted to end childhood obesity, she might begin with food processors who infuse everything we eat with additives and high fructose corn syrup. Going back to more natural food with less additives and bringing recess, tag, and dodge ball back to our schools might be a more successful approach.

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This Is No Way To Fund Pet Projects

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Yesterday The New York Post reported that money will be taken out of the food stamp program to fund Michelle Obama’s pet project, Let’s Move.

The article reports:

On Nov. 1, sizable cuts were gouged into the federal food-stamp program (or, as it’s now called, SNAP, Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program), which feeds 47.6 million people, or nearly one in six Americans. In the city, 1.9 million folks get the bulk of their Jell-O and Campbell’s Soup from stamps.

But news has spread among the poor, like leafy green vegetables, that it wasn’t heartless Republicans who triggered the cuts.

Rather, some of the food-stamp cash was snatched to pay for Michelle Obama’s pet project, Let’s Move. What?

It’s come to this. Some 76 million meals a year will vanish from this city — poof! — partly because the president diverted money from SNAP to the first lady’s signature program, part of her Let’s Move anti-obesity initiative — the bean-sprout-heavy, $4.5 billion Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act.

This project will not create healthy, hunger-free kids. Instead it will create more hungry kids. Another problem with the Let’s Move project is that the school children don’t like Michelle Obama’s healthy lunches. It seems to me that it would be a good idea to mix healthy lunches with things children like to eat for a successful program. However, in no way is it appropriate to take money away from a program that provides children with meals at home that they will eat and invest that money into lunches they will not eat at school.

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How To Drain The Fun Out Of A Fun Event

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CNS News is reporting today that the White House Easter Egg Roll has been turned into a “Let’s Move! Social.” Good grief.

The article reports:

An e-mail from the “Let’s Move!” campaign says the Easter Egg Roll has been turned into a “Let’s Move! Social”:

“We’re excited to announce that our next White House Social will be a Let’s Move! Social here, at the White House. On Monday, April 1st, 2013, the First Family will host the 135th annual White House Easter Egg Roll with the theme ‘Be Healthy, Be Active, Be You!'”

The First Lady’s “followers” will be there to preach to kids about their eating habits:

“We are inviting Let’s Move! followers on Twitter and Facebook and their children, ages 5 – 13, to join the fun on the South Lawn and of course to share their experience with their followers!”

Easter itself is not a Christian holiday–it is a pagan holiday, so I can’t accuse the White House of messing with Christianity. However, I can accuse them of messing with tradition. To me, the arrogance here is to think that what they are doing is so important that they are going to preempt a tradition to preach to innocent young children who only came to roll Easter eggs on the White House lawn.

Sometimes it is just amazing to see how self-important our current first family is.

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