FOOD FOR THOUGHT

FOUR WOMEN'S BLUEPRINT FOR HEALTHIER KIDS

Last week in Washington, an all-day seminar celebrating the MAHA Institute represented a showcase for the vital changes being proposed and implemented by Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. MAHA stands for Make America Healthy Again, in a country where more than 50 percent of adults and almost that many children suffer from a chronic disease. The goal of the new policy center is to reinvent the system and turn fresh ideas into federal laws and regulations.

I watched with fascination the livestreamed panel titled “How do we feed our children?” Four courageous and quite remarkable women took turns onstage inside a Willard Hotel ballroom describing their passion toward answering that question. Full disclosure: one of these women is a highly skilled lawyer who I’ve known since her childhood fifty years ago.

The discussion began with a stunning statistic from the Institute’s Debra Sheldon: In the National School Lunch Program, some 30 million meals a day (150 million every week) are being dished out to our children - and these leave a lot to be desired when it comes to nutritious food. In fact, the Program is a major contributor to the obesity epidemic and having a detrimental impact on our kids.

Nina Teicholz, executive director of the Nutrition Coalition and author of the best-selling book The Big Fat Surprise, is a leading expert on the federal dietary guidelines. The new administration’s announced goal of reversing chronic disease in children cannot happen, she freely admitted, without changing the school meal program. If kids have a breakfast snack and lunch at a public school, that comprises half the calories they ingest every day. And they’re being set up for food addiction particularly to sugar, gradually ruining their metabolic health. “We need to take the whole food pyramid and turn it upside down,” Teicholz said.

The trouble is, there is no limit to the amount of sugar given to kids in their school lunch program. Much of that comes from the chocolate and strawberry milk that they’re drinking. Whole milk would taste better and provide more satiety, but it generally isn’t even an option. A bare minimum of protein is recommended in the current government guidelines. “No saturated fats, no butter, only margarine, and soybean oil to cook everything in; seed oils oxidize easily, especially when heated, and that drives inflammation and leads to heavy oxidation products, some of which are known toxins,” Teicholz pointed out.

Hilary Boynton is the founder of School of Lunch a pioneering program for the past decade in a Topanga Canyon, California private school. One of her five children was once covered head-to-toe in eczema; steroid creams twice a day weren’t helping. What changed her life was putting the little boy on raw milk, after which he completely healed. The local movement she’s founded is all about nutrient-dense food, from products produced locally and seasonally. The hope is that its model can be replicated in public schools everywhere.

Deirdre Goldfarb, who works closely with Hilary, spoke of her 21-year-old son who can’t eat most foods -he’s allergic to about 120 things - as her impetus toward becoming legal counsel for the MAHA Institute. “Even if we have new dietary guidelines, there’s a lot to do to fix the system,” she noted. The system used by public schools to receive their National School Lunch Program reimbursements from the government is not set up to allow any variations and will need to be retrofitted. The goal is to be able to help public schools be able to make healthy changes and resolve any technical prohibitions in the current system.

Leslie Manookian, president of the Health Freedom Defense Fund that recently passed model legislation in Idaho, is also on the board of the Weston A. Price Foundation. Started by the man who headed the American Dental Association in the early 20th century - and traveled the world studying so-called “primitive people cut off from the foods of commerce” - Price found that a diet without white flour, white sugar and seed oils resulted in much healthier and robust individuals. Today, the Foundation has 500 chapters around the world, the majority in the U.S., emphasizing traditional diets in partnerships with regenerative agriculture. “We should be cultivating fermented food, nurturing a diverse microbiome in the gut with raw butter and raw cheese, even raw meats.”

As moderator Debra Sheldon concluded: “This is a moral imperative.”