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OPINION

Food fight in Congress threatens kids: Our view

The Editorial Board
USA TODAY
Biden Arias-Romers, 5, eats lunch at a school in Alexandria, Va.

The U.S. faces an epidemic of childhood obesity and diabetes.

Taxpayers spend $11 billion a year to subsidize school lunches.

Put those two facts together, and you'd think there'd be widespread agreement that the money ought to go toward healthy meals.

That's certainly what Congress thought in 2010, when it passed new rules aimed at reducing the salt, sugar and fat in kids' lunches, while adding whole grains, fruits and vegetables.

Now, however, the rules are under fire from the 10% of school systems that have had trouble implementing them, and from the makers of foods and beverages that don't meet the new standards. On Thursday, the House Appropriations Committee approved a plan to let school districts suspend the rules for the entire coming school year.

This would be a major, and unnecessary, step backward in the effort to make school lunches healthier. Any legitimate problems should be fixable with minor adjustments and some flexibility from the U.S. Department of Agriculture. There's no need for congressional involvement.

Under the plan passed Thursday, a school system that wants to opt out of the nutrition rules would have to show that it lost money on its lunch program for six months. That's hardly a high bar. School lunch programs aren't set up to be profit centers. The way schools finance them can make it easy to show a loss.

Supporters of the waiver plan argue that it's only a one-year suspension for struggling school systems. The problem is, one-year provisions approved by Congress have a way of getting renewed year after year. Not only is the blanket waiver overkill, it's the opening shot in a war to significantly weaken the rules when Congress rewrites the 2010 nutrition bill next year.

No wonder first lady Michelle Obama was unusually aggressive in sounding the alarm this week. She accused Congress of trying to "roll back everything we have worked for" and playing "politics with our kids' health."

Studies have shown that nutrition standards work. Even before the new national rules took effect in 2012, researchers at the University of Illinois found significantly lower child obesity rates in states that set their own strict nutrition rules.

Critics of the national rules complain that kids who are required to select a vegetable or a piece of fruit with their school lunches often simply dump them in the trash. True enough, but kids were dumping food long before the stricter standards went into effect.

Using "plate waste" as an excuse to get rid of healthy food would be like a high school English teacher substituting comic books if students balked at reading Dickens and Hemingway. Cafeteria aides report that if healthier choices are available, kids eventually adapt to them.

The chief supporter of suspending or weakening the nutrition rules is the School Nutrition Association, a trade group of school food officials backed by food companies such as Coca-Cola, Domino's Pizza and PepsiCo.

Interestingly, though, 19 of the association's former presidents are calling on Congress to reject the waiver plan. It's time to take it off the table.

USA TODAY's editorial opinions are decided by its Editorial Board, separate from the news staff. Most editorials are coupled with an opposing view — a unique USA TODAY feature.

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