Does This Look Like 554 Calories?

By Ed Bruske
aka The Slow Cook

The federal government says that school breakfasts served to elementary school students must contain 554 calories to qualify as a reimbursable meal. The "cold" breakfast option in D.C. schools on Friday was a muffin and string cheese. My daughter, who is lactose intolerant, declined to take milk. But in terms of total calories, that would make 110 for low-fat milk, 60 for the string cheese, 55 for the orange juice for a total of 225 calories. There's no nutritional information with the muffin, but I'm guessing it does not contain 329 calories.

There's a wrinkle to the federal rules, however. The daily calorie requirement is supposed to reflect an average for the week, meaning some meals might contain more than 554 calories, others less.

The only cold breakfast option I saw listed for the first two weeks of school that came even close to that was the one with a processed breakfast bar called BeneFIT that packed a whopping 48 grams of carbohydrates (starch) and 23 grams of sugar (more than in a Pop-Tart, and almost as much as in an 8-ounce carton of chocolate milk), for a total of 290 calories. Or maybe it was Wednesday's whole wheat bagel with cream cheese and "all natural yogurt" containing four teaspoons of sugar in a quarter-cup portion.

Those are the prevailing federal standards, as administered by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Meanwhile, the school meal standards contained in the District's "Healthy Schools Act" set a minimum calorie requirement for breakfast of 350 in pre-kindergarten through grade eight, and a maximum of 500. But the current food services director for D.C. Public Schools says he's adopted even better standards--those proposed by the Institute of Medicine, which call for 350 to 500 calories at breakfast for kindergarten through grade five.

The IOM standards were requested by the USDA, but it may be years before the USDA actually adopts them.

Confused yet?

You needn't be. The common denominator running through this rat's nest of government standards is that when schools are unable to offer kids enough calorie-dense real foods to comply with regulations they serve up sugar instead. To add a further complication, the federal rules state that schools can include in their calculations all of the foods offered on any given morning--the milk, the muffin, the string cheese, the orange juice--even though the kids can decline one of those items and still qualify for a federal reimbursement under the government's nutrient-based menu system, or they must take three items under the food-based menu system. (Could it be any more complicated?).

That helps explain why juice, with its extra dose of sugar, is being offered every day for breakfast in D.C. schools alongside milk.

Take your pick: On any given morning, kids aren't getting as many calories as the government calls for, or they may be getting them in the form of sugar. Does that mean schools are lax for not offering better options, or are the federal standards crazy and the amount of financial support provided by the federal government simply inadequate to offer the kinds of healthy foods kids should be eating?

The irony, of course, is that we pleaded with D.C. schools to get rid of sugar and they responded: They dumped flavored milk and sugary cereals. They've also gone to some pains to introduce things like cottage cheese and string cheese and local fruit. What else can they add in the way of real food that will satisfy the government's calorie requirements without dosing kids with more sugar?

D.C. Public Schools have an advantage as a result of the extra funding provided by the "Healthy Schools" act: 10 cents more for breakfast, 10 cents more for lunch and five cents for each meal that contains a locally grown component. Imagine the predicament of other school districts where the local government has not stepped forward with extra cash. The extra six cents per meal recently embraced by the U.S. Senate as part of the Child Nutrition re-authorization looks punier and punier all the time.

The Calories that Count

By Dr. Susan Rubin

Albert Einstein said that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. When it comes to food, we’ve been counting calories for years expecting a weight loss result that hasn’t materialized. While the food industry would like us to believe that ‘’energy balance” is all that really matters, it's time for us to take a good long look at the mythology behind calories in our food.

Morgan Spurlock demonstrated in his movie Super Size Me that most Americans don’t have a clue as to what a calorie is. A calorie is a measure of heat. It’s the amount of energy necessary to raise 1 gram of water 1 degree Celcius.

Based on the laws of thermodynamics, we are led to believe that the food we eat contains a certain amount of calories and that these calories are “burned” based on a set daily rate that depends on our activity level. In other words, you can “burn” more calories by exercising. Theoretically, if we eat less and exercise more, we will lose weight.

Of course, the food industry loves to make you feel guilty about not exercising enough. It helps to reinforce this false belief that it all comes down to calories. PepsiCo’s CEO Indra Nooyi recently stated, “If all consumers exercised, did what they had to do, the problem of obesity wouldn't exist.”

The science behind calorie burning works in a closed system such as a lab in which all factors can be isolated and measured. Our bodies are not simple machines that take calories in and burn them in a straightforward fashion. We are highly complex biological and energetic systems, not closed systems like those found in a science lab. It is virtually impossible to calculate how we burn calories because many variables impact our metabolic rate. This is one of the reasons that more than 80% of all diet strategies fail.

Common sense would tell you that 100 calories of sugar water is not the same as 100 calories of sautéed kale. Our bodies are way smarter than what the food industry would like us to believe. Changing portion sizes and creating “better for you” packaged processed foods is simply a Ponzi scheme that keeps everyone from realizing the big picture. Calorie cuts won’t solve the obesity crisis, but it will continue to create healthy profits for the food industry. The 1.5 trillion calorie cut recently pledged by the Healthy Weight Commitment Foundation in response to the White House Task Force on Childhood Obesity is a fancy ploy to avoid legislation that might keep these money-making products out of schools.

There is another calorie count that is far more important than the food industry’s smoke and mirrors. Right now, 10 calories of fossil fuel are required to make every 1 calorie of industrialized food. Considering we now consume six barrels of oil for every one barrel we discover, we need to understand that we’ve got to create ways to produce food using less oil. The underwater oil gusher in the Gulf of Mexico is a grim reminder that the era of easy oil is over. Let’s consider just some of the ways the food industry burns calories.

Fertilizers and pesticides used to grow food are derived from natural gas and petroleum. Machinery used in planting and harvesting industrial food guzzle large quantities of fossil fuels. Packaging utilizes plastics, another petroleum product. Most food products travel thousands of miles en route to their final destination burning more fuel. Some are refrigerated or frozen, burning yet more calories of energy so we can conveniently buy these foods and beverages everywhere. Burning these calories results in more CO2 in the atmosphere and pushes us closer to peak oil.

When we start to consider how many resources are used to produce those “low calorie” edible food-like substances, we end up with real costs to our health, our wallets and our environment. How do we produce food that supports our health and burns fewer fossil fuels? The best food is closest to home: backyard gardens are the answer to both. The White House Task Force on Obesity should recommend gardens be placed in every schoolyard and outside every town hall. This strategy would cut trillions of calories and put better food on our tables.

Dr. Susan Rubin is a nutritionist, former dentist and organizer of Better School Food.