White House Kid Indoctrination Video Contains Dangerous Advice: "
That Michelle Obama is such a charmer! Not only does she feel it is her place to tell you what you can and can’t feed your child, but she wants the little darlings to hear her message firsthand.
Toward that end, the White House blog currently carries a video of Sesame Street‘s own lovable Elmo paying a visit to the White House kitchen, where Assistant White House Chef Sam Kass allays the Muppet’s fears about school lunch. The video was posted in preparation for passage of the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act of 2010, which occurred this past week. (I don’t seem to recall my own kids expressing any concerns about what they would be eating for lunch when they were starting school, but maybe it’s a generational thing.)
One particularly interesting part of the video occurs at around cue 1:26 and includes this exchange:
ELMO: Does Mr. Sam know that fruit is a food you can eat any time?
KASS: Yes, fruit is an “any time” food. You can eat it any time you want.
Really? Having ghost-written some half dozen books on childhood nutrition in a previous lifetime, it struck me as odd that the “Let’s Move” team was imparting directly to children this patently ludicrous and pernicious piece of advice.
While there is no question that fruits make for a better snack than refined foods such as cookies and chips, it is possible to “OD” on fruit. Even the USDA, which is bullish on fruit, advises an upward limit of 4 servings per day.
The reason for limiting fruit primarily resides in the fact that these foods are simple carbohydrates, which is another way of saying they contain sugar. “But sugar from fruit is natural, so you should be able to eat as much as you want, right?” asks Ben Kim, a web health guru. By way of an answer, he writes:
This question is best asked of fruitarians—people who eat nothing but raw fruits. . . .
Regardless of which approach is taken, I have not met a single strict fruitarian of more than two years who didn’t have significant health challenges. The most common challenges are dental decay, osteoporosis, wasting of muscle tissue, inability to maintain a healthy weight, chronic fatigue, skin problems, thinning hair, weakening nails, and excessive irritability. [Emphasis in the original]
Obviously most children are not going to face these pitfalls (except maybe for tooth decay—as Kim notes elsewhere, “a lot of the fruit that is grown today is much higher in sugar than they would be in a natural environment”). Nevertheless, telling children that fruit is an “any time” food crosses the line separating sound health advice from rubbish.
It is hard to imagine that nutritionists, who presumably read the bill, would have signed off on such a malicious, self-destructive notion, so I went back and checked the text of S. 3307: Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act. To be sure there’s no recommendation anywhere in it that children eat unlimited quantities of fruit.
Then again, the kiddies aren’t going to be reading the text of the law anyway. They are going to be watching their friend Elmo tell them that fruit is a “free” food. Good luck to parents trying to persuade their offspring otherwise.
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