Health Blog: OMG! Pizza is a vegetable

Share

Tweet

Email This Page

Sign up here for
our Newsletter: *

Congress is messing with school lunches and kid's health

WellWise tries to stay away from politics as much as we can, but when Congress starts touching our food in an unhealthy way, then we have no other option.

The House Appropriations Committee has set out to block new regulations from the USDA that are intended to make school lunches healthier. Big Food didn’t like the changes, because they would have taken french fries, pizza, and salt off the kids menu. They convinced the committee that the proposed USDA rules were “unhealthy” and “expensive” because our school children would be denied access to the vitamins and minerals in french fries.

The same USDA rules would have set a full cup of tomato paste as a minimum vegetable serving, and that was too much to fit on an industrial pizza, so the pizza industry rebelled. The same with the salt industry. The politicians agreed and gave them their old rules back so that fries and pizza continue to qualify as a vegetable in subsidized school lunches.

The agricultural industry has the committee in its back pocket; see chart. The industry interests were deemed to be more important than the health of our children. It’s upsetting, but it is not news. The old standard that qualifies French fries and two table spoons of tomato paste as a vegetable serving will stand, because the proposed law (“mini-bus”) will surely be adopted by both the House and the Senate, since it keeps six departments funded past December.

The justification made by the chairman of the committee is that they are doing away with unnecessary and costly regulations. The real perspective is of course that unhealthy foods are addictive, and that our children need the nutrition of athletes if we want them to attain peak brain performance. Grease, sugar, salt don’t fit that picture.

If we as a society invest tens of thousands of dollars per child to get a smart next generation, then we better make sure that this future generation is healthy too. Purely from an appropriations perspective: Why would we as a nation let big food companies, for a quick buck, destroy our long term investment in our children?

Omega 6 to 3 ratio

Pizza and fries are not brain building nutrition. The human brain is mostly fat and not just any fat. It’s made from omega 3 phospholipids. When a peak performing brain runs on omega 3, then why do politicians want to stuff our kids with omega 6 fats from French fries and pizza? When the omega 6 to omega 3 ratio gets out of whack, the omega 6 will cause chronic diseases like obesity, diabetes, arthritis, and may we ad stupidity.

Pizza can be healthy. It takes some creativity and knowledge about ingredients to put a healthy veggie pie together. Big food business is welcome to just do that. But they know they will fail, so that’s why they wanted the old rules back. Their motive is profit, not health, and so they will take nutrition out and put addictive industrial garbage in.

A quick survey among the diners at our local pizzeria showed that the women were all against declaring a pizza a vegetable, because it is obviously ridiculous. The men on the other hand liked the idea: “Does that make a peperoni pizza a vegetable too?”

Recommended further reading:

• WellWise Brain Blog by Debi Elliott: First feed the brain, and then challenge the brain.
• Michael Schmidt, author of the book Brain Building Nutrition, Brain Blogs on WellWise.
• WellWise has an omega 6 sub site about omega 6 to omega 3 ratio and the devastating diseases that will strike if this ratio is out of balance.
• Lycopene the gift of tomatoes