Well, fuck, I had many hours of phys ed weekly, my phys. ed teacher taught me Karate, and other phys ed teachers before him taught me the rules for many American Games like base ball and tag football, not to mention dodge- and Kick- Ball, they also taught me to squaredance. later I started running, swimming, and lifting at the “Y” from 16 on due to School Phys ed. My first phys ed teacher, Mr. McGraw went heavy on the tumbling and gymnastics, as a fat kid I couldn’t quite realAte, but as a
Well, fuck, I had many hours of phys ed weekly, my phys. ed teacher taught me Karate, and other phys ed teachers before him taught me the rules for many American Games like base ball and tag football, not to mention dodge- and Kick- Ball, they also taught me to squaredance. later I started running, swimming, and lifting at the “Y” from 16 on due to School Phys ed. My first phys ed teacher, Mr. McGraw went heavy on the tumbling and gymnastics, as a fat kid I couldn’t quite realAte and adapt due to physical limitations due to my body typpe, but later i found my worth and coming into my own on the defensive end as a tugowar anchor.
I probably should have played football and wrestled, but i was cut from a different cloth that my early mentors abandoned and neglected. rthey weren’t quite ready for the scholar athlete.
And I’m sure on hot button conservative topics like religion, drugs and sexual mores Bachmann remains absolutely true to her rhetoric.
I don’t understand this thinking at all. The federal government has, rightly, mandated a nutrition program in all public school students and, by and large, is paying for it. Further, the feds set guidelines for the nutritional value of the food its paying for. Upon the recommendation of non-governmental medical professionals based on the overall health of the school children, the federal government is tasked with updating and improving those guidelines so that the food paid for by taxpayers actually has some nutritional value that does not contribute to to the growing problem of childhood obesity and diabetes.
I’m struggling to see how this is fascism.
Jamie Oliver isn’t the government and he faced enormous resistance to his attempts to introduce fresh, tasty, low-fat food to school cafeterias.
Aren’t you yourself (by your own admission, IIRC) morbidly obese? To what degree do you think that shapes your opposition to “food fascism,” and do you really think you’re a good exemplar for what can be accomplished in defiance of the “scientific mandate”?
I have no comment about Michele Obama’s campaign, since I’ve seen nothing of it. Nor have I seen anything of the backlash to it. But I do want to comment on some of the statements in this thread, that could be factually correct, but ooze with self-righteousness and insults:
The “I know better than you” attitude poisons these posters’ points. It’s totally counterproductive; You’re not going to sway anyone to change their mind this way.
Well, look. The issue here is that people don’t like being told that they’re doing something wrong by someone who knows more or better than they do. “I know better than you” is sometimes true. In this (general) case, it is.
The fact that some people will view that as Michelle Obama being snotty/elitist/whatever reflects poorly on them, not on her.
I mean, I get your point, it seems to me that it’s almost impossible to communicate to a population that they’re doing something unwise and unhealthy without that population feeling like they’re being talked down to.
I agree completely. It’s a hard problem.
It’s not enough to be right. The message has to come across in a way that makes people want to change. If there’s significant pushback against Michele Obama’s campaign, it would seem that it’s failing that part. Maybe her own messaging is fine, but her allies are overpushing it.
What do you consider “relatively recently”? I graduated high school in 1975, which was two trimesters ahead of time, so I was going to school in the 1960s and 70s.
For the most part, I went to school in Texas. In grades 2-5, we had calisthenics three days a week. In grades 6-12, we had mostly sports instruction in the general PE class. That is, we’d do a segment on baseball, then one on tennis, one on bowling, one on basketball, etc. We had almost NO instruction on actual physical fitness. Our teachers’ goals were to turn out kids who could play sports. They didn’t care if we could use these skills after we’d graduated.
I was never taught how to use weights in order to increase my strength or fitness, nor was I taught about aerobic exercise. The girls in PE were allowed to walk and jog around the track if they’d forgotten (or said they’d forgotten) their uniforms, and that was about the extent of our aerobic training. I was never taught which exercises I should do for health improvement, or how to do them. Nope, it was SPORTS SPORTS SPORTS all the way.
The problem lies not in what she is saying or in how she is saying it. The problem is that she is saying it.
Broadly speaking, PE began to modernize in the 70’s and 80’s. When I began training as a teacher in the mid 90’s the “sport model” of PE was definitely out of favor at the college level. Which is to say new teachers were discouraged from it and taught other models, but it was still used in public schools because older teachers favored it. Or rather, that was all they knew.
As I said - good news / bad news - even today many PE programs do things very poorly in my view. It’s all over the place. Some school districts are diamonds in the rough with innovative programs that would bear almost no resemblance to what you remember from school. Other places are still stuck in the 1940’s. I considered it a huge compliment when people would look in on my classes and remark that it looked nothing like the PE they had.
I believe a lot of this is conservatism among PE teachers (in the literal sense of resisting change, not political conservatism), and the continued focus on interscholastic athletics vs. PE. I think sports are fine, but in the end many PE people are coaches first and teachers a distant second. This is what ultimately made me leave the field. I was interested in being a PE teacher, not a basketball coach. My classes were well planned and executed, and I believe resulted in actual learning among the kids who needed it the most - the ones who weren’t likely to be on sports teams. But the fact of that profession is, good teaching won’t get you noticed and appreciated. Winning football games does, so I moved on.
You recall incorrectly. I am obese, but not morbidly. I have been so-called “skinny” and fat, and on many different diets and know more about food and nutrition than many of the people participating in this thread. If anything I have a unique and particularly knowledgable position about this from both sides and it changes not one iota my position, if anything it reinforces my postion that it is a complex situation and taking away pizza and french fries from a lunch program is going to make no difference whatsoever.
It’s been demonstrated that there is sound medical and scientific reasoning for changing the nutritional guidelines set by the USDA for school food paid for by American taxpayers. What is the reasoning for leaving pizza and french fries intact (and to take it a step further, frozen foods high in fat, sodium, and sugar) in the federal nutrition program?
And please explain, while you’re at it, how updating already existing standards for nutrition is fascism.
Ummm you are going to have to give me examples of what exactly are high in fat, sodium, and sugar in the school lunch programs? People keep saying that the food served in schools are unhealthy… I personally didn’t experience that some 20 years ago… the foods that they served then and still do serve are all within well established healthy standards, servings, and guidelines, IME.
Yeah, it’s a bizarre assertion. We are talking about taking something that is already regulated, and tweaking it so that the program actually achieves its purpose. Who could possibly be against that?
Someone who does not understand the issue. Someone who thinks the government is going to ask “what did your child have for breakfast?” Someone who is so partisan that they must automatically be against it because it was proposed by a Democrat.
See post # 8
Are you serious? You must have been living under a rock for the last 20 years. Actually, I take that back, what’s 20 years in this debate? Maybe you did eat the same thing as my kid is currently being served (if she did, in fact, eat in the cafeteria), but I can tell you what I ate nearly 30 years ago was significantly different. The main difference between most of what I was fed was cooked on site, mostly from scratch. You will not find many schools that are doing that these days. My daughter’s certainly doesn’t; they reheat frozen foods and the only fresh things served are apples and oranges in whole form that a decent number of the kids throw out because nobody to any effort to do anything to them to make them appealing to children, like make a great salad out of them.
You should know that dietary guidelines across the board has changed significantly over the years. You should also know that children are sicker now in greater numbers than they ever have been before. You might attribute that to excessive video gaming or a lack of recess/PE in school, but even considering those as factors, shouldn’t eating habits be adjusted to accommodate a more sedentary lifestyle? Or should we just keep feeding today’s kids exactly the same as yesterday’s kids because it seemed to work so well 20 years ago? And did it work so well? Did it work for you? Isn’t it advisable to address the factor(s) in which we *can *affect change. Since the government is feeding kids, it seems to make a lot of sense that the government take measures to update its nutrition standards to ensure it’s not contributing to the obesity epidemic among children.
For over a century, the federal government via the USDA has been publishing dietary recommendations to promote the health of the American public. Here’s the most recent recommendations. Here’s a history (link to PDF doc) of the USDA Dietary Recommendations. You’ll notice a trend that the USDA changes its guidelines in response to the health and nutritional needs of the American people and is based on the current understanding of nutritional science.
The USDA, in conjunction with the Institute of Medicine, has determined that school nutrition guidelines do not adhere to the most recent Dietary Guidelines it has published. Since the federal government, through its National School Lunch Program (NSLP), subsidizes the feeding of over 30 million school children each day, you’d think it would make sense that they should feed the dietary guidelines they promote. Particularly when you consider the recommendations are made as a result of an alarming trend of childhood obesity and diabetes.
I’d still like to know what you deem fascist about this. Surely, you realize that children have no choice when it comes to what food is available to them. Either their parents or the school makes that decision. As a parent, I’d expect the school to make the healthiest option available as they should not be undermining the nutritional standards I set for my child. We are on a seriously limited budget and my daughter qualifies for free/reduced lunch, but I wouldn’t feed her that disgusting crap on a daily basis even for free and if she she wanted it, which she doesn’t. And I could use the help. I’m not holier than thou. I treated her to McDonald’s tonight (we had a coupon). I completely understand how hard it is to build healthy, diverse, and tasty meals on a strict budget. But it’s not impossible to instill nutritional sense in a child if you practice what you preach. Public school just aren’t doing that in their cafeterias.
If you still want some examples of what today’s kids are eating in school, I give you Fed Up With Lunch in all its pre-packaged, frozen, reheated splendor. It’s not hard to find schools with awful lunch programs. Heck, Jamie Oliver has made a career out of crusading against crappy school food. You can also find schools that have figured out how to do it better. I don’t see any fascism there, either.
I don’t think being skinny, and then getting fat, is a particularly unique experience.