Federal food “smart snack” rules imposed on schools this year are taking a huge bite out of vending and a la carte sales in Florida’s Pasco County Schools, and officials aren’t concealing their opinions.

By the end of September, a la carte sales in the school district had plummeted by $1,300 a day compared to last year, subsiding somewhat to a $938 per day loss in October, the Tampa Tribune reports.

“This is federal overreach at its worst,” school board member Joanne Hurley said at a policy workshop Tuesday.

The smart snack rules represent the most recent round of federal restrictions on foods sold in schools that participate in the National School Lunch Program. The new rules are part of the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act, a federal overhaul of school food championed by First Lady Michelle Obama.

Thus far, the federal restrictions on calories, fat, whole grains, sodium and other elements of food sold in schools has resulted in widespread opposition, with many students ditching their mandatory greens or skipping lunch altogether to avoid the bland, unappetizing new cafeteria offerings.

The result has been more than 1 million students dropping out of the program and more than $1 billion in food waste. The situation has gotten so bad for some school districts, officials have opted to forgo federal lunch funding to salvage their cafeteria programs by feeding students foods they’ll actually buy and eat.

It’s also meant school clubs or sports teams that used to sell candy bars or other foods that no longer fit within the guidelines can no longer do so during school hours. That has forced many schools, including Pasco County’s, to shift to other types of non-food fundraisers, which are less popular.

Julie Hedline, director of food services for Pasco County Schools, told the Tampa Tribune that even some of the district’s most healthy a la carte lunch items can no longer be served to students, and there isn’t much officials can do about it.

School board slams Michelle O’s snack rules: ‘Federal overreach at its worst’ – EAGnews.org

Children who take a lot of antibiotics before age 2 are slightly more likely than others to become obese, according to a new study.

The paper is the latest in a growing field of research examining the effects of modern life on the trillions of beneficial bacteria living in and on the human body.

While the research doesn’t definitively prove that the drugs make children gain weight, it’s consistent with earlier studies in humans and animals linking antibiotics to obesity, says coauthor Charles Bailey, an assistant professor at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia.

Many scientists are now concerned that exposure to antibiotics — from medication, food or even tap water — has the potentiall to kill off some of the beneficial bacteria that may protect people from chronic diseases, Bailey says.

The human body plays hosts to an ecosystem of 100 trillion microbes, known as the “microbiome,” which has emerged in recent years as one of the hottest fields in science.

There’s accumulating evidence that these invisible guests play key roles in keeping us healthy. Changes in modern life — from the proliferation of processed food and preservatives to rising rates of C-sections — are altering these flora and fauna, said Martin Blaser, director of the Human Microbiome Program at New York University. He’s concerned that those changes leave children today more vulnerable to chronic conditions, including allergies, asthma and even autism.

“It’s coming in every direction,” said Blaser, author of Missing Microbes: How the Overuse of Antibiotics is Fueling Our Modern Plagues, who was not involved in the new study. “We’re really assaulting our microbiome.”

Authors of the new study, who looked at health records of nearly 65,000 children from 2001 to 2013, found that nearly 70% of kids got oral antibiotics by age 2, with an average of 2.3 rounds of antibiotics per child. At this age, antibiotics are often prescribed for ear infections, bronchitis and other common ailments.

Children who received the most antibiotics — four or more courses — were 11% more likely to become obese compared to kids who received none, according to the study, published Monday in JAMA Pediatrics.

Kids who received broad-spectrum antibiotics — those that kill a wide range of bacteria — were 16% more likely to become obese.

Bailey notes that those risks are relatively small — about the same as the increased risk of obesity seen in children with asthma.

But Bailey says it’s possible that antibiotics are one of many factors that contribute to weight gain in children, along with diet and activity levels. “It may be a piece of the puzzle,” Bailey says.

Antibiotics linked to child obesity

If your belt needs to be let out a notch, you’re not alone. The average American waistline is growing even though obesity rates haven’t grown. And excess abdominal fat increases the risk of heart disease, diabetes and stroke.

The collective American waistline grew by more than an inch from 1999-2000 to 2011-2012, according to a study published Tuesday in JAMA, the Journal of the American Medical Association.

The study results come at a time when the percentage of Americans who are overweight or obese has stabilized. In short, people haven’t been getting fatter, but their waistlines are still increasing.

“We’re a little bit puzzled for explanations,” Dr. Earl Ford, a medical epidemiologist at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and lead author of the study, tells Shots. The two measures are closely related: While body mass index or BMI measures fat overall, waist circumference helps measure fat distribution.

Stress, hormonal imbalances, environmental pollutants, poor sleep or medications that help pack on abdominal weight are possible causes, health and nutrition researchers speculate. And older adults typically lose muscle as they age, while fat continues to increase.

Ford and his team used data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES), which polled 32,816 adult men and women who were not pregnant. The mean waist circumference of Americans increased from 37.6 inches in 1999-2000 to 38.8 inches in 2011-2012. Men, women, non-Hispanic whites, non-Hispanic blacks and Mexican-Americans showed significant gains.

The prevalence of abdominal obesity (a waist circumference of greater than 40.2 inches or size 44 in men and 34.6 inches or size 12/14 in women) increased from 46.4 percent of the sample in 1999-2000 to 54.2 percent in 2011-2012.

Generally, as waist circumference increases, the amount of belly fat increases, too. But that’s not true for everyone. African-Americans tend to have somewhat less abdominal fat for the same waist size than do whites and Hispanics.

Regardless, “people should not only watch their weight, but also their waistline,” Frank Hu, a professor of nutrition and epidemiology at the Harvard School of Public Health, tells Shots via email.

Ford believes it’s important to continue looking at abdominal obesity to judge how American health is doing.

“I can’t really say exactly why BMI has gained favor in our national statistics,” he says. “It may have to do that height and weight have been more consistently measured and that waist circumference has been included on some [statistics] but not as many as height and weight have been.”

Fat Thanks to Sona S. for the tip!

Americans’ Waistlines Are Expanding, And That’s Not Good Fat : Shots – Health News : NPR

Americans are getting fatter, and older. These converging trends are putting the USA on the path to an alarming health crisis: Nearly half of adults have either pre-diabetes or diabetes, raising their risk of heart attacks, blindness, amputations and cancer.

Federal health statistics show that 12.3% of Americans 20 and older have diabetes, either diagnosed or undiagnosed. Another 37% have pre-diabetes, a condition marked by higher-than-normal blood sugar. That’s up from 27% a decade ago. An analysis of 16 studies involving almost 900,000 people worldwide, published in the current issue of the journal Diabetologia, shows pre-diabetes not only sets the stage for diabetes but also increases the risk of cancer by 15%.

“It’s bad everywhere,” says Philip Kern, director of the Barnstable Brown Diabetes and Obesity Center at the University of Kentucky. “You almost have the perfect storm of an aging population and a population growing more obese, plus fewer reasons to move and be active, and fast food becoming more prevalent.”

Pre-diabetes, diabetes rates fuel national health crisis

Olive Garden offered that many $100, all-you-can-eat pasta deals on the restaurant chain’s website at 3 p.m. ET. The passes, which run from Sept. 22 to Nov. 9, sold out quickly.

At 4:15 p.m., the chain posted to its Twitter (TWTR, Tech30) and Facebook (FB, Tech30) pages that it ran out of the deals and hinted that more might be on the way.

Any customer who bought the “Never Ending Pasta Pass” will have unrestricted access to pasta with toppings like chicken and shrimp fritta, and can wash it down with an infinite supply of Coca-Cola (CCE) soft drinks.

The special offer is an advanced version of the Never Ending Pasta Bowl, an annual, limited-time, all-you-can-eat pasta deal for $10. Customers consumed 13 million bowls of pasta during last year’s promo, according to the company.

Olive Garden, which is owned by Darden Restaurants (DRI), has more than 800 restaurants and employs 96,000 people, with annual sales of $3.6 billion.

Orlando-based Darden owns 1,500 restaurants under brand names such as Longhorn Steakhouse and Bahama Breeze, totaling 150,000 employees and $6.3 billion in annual sales.

Olive Garden’s ‘Never Ending Pasta Pass’ sells out – Sep. 8, 2014

Rates of adult obesity increased in six U.S. states and fell in none last year, and in more states than ever – 20 – at least 30% of adults are obese, according to an analysis released on Thursday.

The conclusions were reported by the Trust for America’s Health and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and were based on federal government data. They suggest the problem may be worsening despite widespread publicity about the nation’s obesity epidemic, from First Lady Michelle Obama and many others, plus countless programs to address it.

From 2011 to 2012, by comparison, the rate of obesity increased in only one state.

The 2013 adult obesity rate exceeds 20% in every state, while 42 have rates above 25%. For the first time two states, Mississippi and West Virginia, rose above 35%. The year before, 13 states were above 30% and 41 had rates of at least 25%.

Adult obesity rates increased last year in Alaska, Delaware, Idaho, New Jersey, Tennessee and Wyoming.

Nationally, rates of obesity remained at about one-third of the adult population, according to The State of Obesity: Better Policies for a Healthier America (http://stateofobesity.org), while just over two-thirds are overweight or worse.

Rates of childhood obesity have leveled off, with about one in three 2- to 19-year-olds overweight or obese in 2012, comparable to rates over the last decade.

Continuing a years-long trend, nine of the 10 states with the highest rates of obesity are in the South. The West and Northeast had the healthiest BMIs, with Colorado boasting the lowest adult obesity rate, 21.3%.

Obesity rates reach historic highs in more U.S. states – Yahoo News

Central New York’s Fayetteville-Manlius and Baldwinsville school districts are the latest to ditch the National School Lunch Program, which was revamped in 2010 under the guidance of First Lady Michelle Obama in an effort to fight childhood obesity.

Strict limits on calories, fat, sugar, carbohydrates, sodium and other aspects of the school lunch imposed by the federal government on schools participating in the free and reduced lunch program has not only increased cafeteria costs, they’ve resulted in a drastic drop in the number of participating students.

At Fayetteville-Manlius, Baldwinsville, and thousands of other districts the new regulations resulted in a sharp downturn in students who eat school lunch and a sharp increase in food waste. The lost sales are threatening the viability of cafeteria programs in schools across the country, prompting many to do without federal subsidies to serve students food they’ll actually buy and eat.

“Grilled cheese and tomato soup was a very popular lunch,” Baldwinsville Superintendent David Hamilton told WRVO public media. “We couldn’t offer that under the new guidelines of the federal government. Spaghetti and meatballs, we couldn’t offer that either.”

As a result of last year’s school lunch menu high school lunch sales in Baldwinsville plummeted from about 600 to 430 students per day.

New York schools drop Michelle O’s lunch program – EAGnews.org

Turns out, eating foods with fat — everything from avocados and nuts to dairy fat — doesn’t make us fat.

But eating too many carbohydrates — particularly the heavily refined starches found in bagels, white pasta and crackers — does our collective waistlines no favors.

Researchers at Tulane University tracked two groups of dieters for one year. The participants ranged in age from their early 20s to their mid-70s and included a mix of African-Americans and Caucasians.

The low-carb group, which reduced their carb consumption to about 28 percent of their daily calories, lost almost three times as much weight as the low-fat dieters who got about 40 to 45 percent of their calories from carbs.

The low-fat group lost about 4 pounds, whereas the low-carb group’s average weight loss was almost 12 pounds. Participants in the two groups were eating about the same amount of calories.

Lydia Bazzano, one of the study authors and an associate professor of epidemiology at Tulane, says she had anticipated some difference in weight loss between the two groups. But the size of the effect — the nearly 8-pound difference in weight loss — was surprising, she says.

So, what kinds of meals were the low-carb dieters eating?

“Typically in the morning they were eating eggs,” says Bazzano. Other breakfast items included small portions of high-protein, high-fiber bread, with either butter or other kinds of oily spread.

As for lunch and dinner, the low-carb dieters ate lots of vegetables, salads and protein, including fish, chicken and some red meat. They had generous portions of healthy fats such as olive oils, canola and other plant-based oils.

Fat accounted for a sizable part of their diet: from 40 percent to 43 percent of their total daily calories, including about 12 percent from saturated fat.

Fat Thanks to Sona S. for the tip!

via Cutting Back On Carbs, Not Fat, May Lead To More Weight Loss : The Salt : NPR.