What's for Lunch: Chicken with a Ton of Starch

By Ed Bruske
aka The Slow Cook

According to the Chartwells menu website, this meal consisted of baked barbecue chicken with a whole wheat roll, a salad of romaine lettuce and local tomatoes, "herb-roasted" potato wedges with shredded carrot, and locally grown watermelon.

Well, the roll has turned into a bun, the tomatoes are missing from the salad and replacing the watermelon appears to be a peach.

This isn't particularly surprising. Sometimes the cafeteria may not have exactly what's posted on the menu on-line and substitutes something else. But here you have a case of bread and potato together, and double-whammy of starch that's sure to get kids' insulin pumping. Insulin is the body's fat storage hormone. But USDA regulations require grain servings, and potatoes qualify as a vegetable.

Adding grated carrots to roasted potatoes (no doubt re-heated from frozen) is an interesting concept. The kids definitely like the chicken.

What's for Breakfast: Carbs, anyone?

A quick jolt of insulin waiting to happen.

By Ed Bruske
aka The Slow Cook

When we eat carbs, they turn into glucose, a form of sugar, and the body responds by producing insulin. Insulin is a powerful hormone that delivers the glucose to muscle cells to be burned, or to fat cells to be stored as fat.

Too much insulin over a period of time--meaning too much consumption of carbohydrates, especially highly refined carbs such as white bread, rice, pasta, sugar--and eventually to receptor cells on the muscles wear out. The body produces more and more insulin to get the receptor cells to respond. When they don't, you've got diabetes.

Maybe we should be having a national conversation on insulin, and not just obesity.

The meals in D.C. schools, loaded with sugar and cheap, refined carbohydrates, are a perfect recipe for obesity and diabetes down the road. But guess what? There are no limits on carbohydrates--and especially sugar--in any of the prevailing regulations that govern school meal programs.

Today's Lunch: Glycemic Bomb

By Ed Bruske

aka The Slow Cook

Cheap carbohydrates are the favorite foods of school districts across the country. What's wrong with carbs? Unlike protein and fat, carbohydrates turn into sugar (glucose) when you eat them, which signals the body to produce insulin. A powerful hormone, insulin is responsible for storing fat in the body and has also been implicated in an all-too-familiar complex of modern diseases: obesity, diabetes, high blood pressure, atherosclerosis.

Teachers complain that kids are out of control after school meals. The high doses of sugar and other carbs could be an explanation. Kids get an initial jolt of energy from this type of meal, but typically the body overcompensates with insulin: After eating so many carbs, you will soon be feeling lethargic and hungry again.

Consider this meal served last week at my daughter's school. The entree is a highly-processed version of chicken nuggets, but you can't see the chicken under all the breading (carbs). Next to the chicken nuggets is a big blob of sugary barbecue sauce for dipping (pure carbs). The baked beans are all starch (carbs) swimming in a sugary sauce (more carbs). The macaroni and cheese is mostly refined pasta (carbs).

So far this meal is perfectly acceptable under the rules that govern the federally subsidized meal program. You've got protein in the chicken and a little bit of fat in the cheese, plenty of grain (no kidding) and the beans. Instead of a vegetable, we have fruit: a cup of diced peaches. Healthy, right? Well, maybe, if you don't count all the sugar in those peaches.

And as a beverage with this meal the kids were served orange juice rather than milk. I checked the ingredients on the carton. A 4-ounce serving contained 12 grams of sugar, about the equivalent of three teaspoons.

Truly, this meal is enough to send anyone's blood sugar through the roof.