The Biden administration is set to boost the health standards of meals provided in public schools across the U.S.
The plan is to reduce the amount of sugars, salt and fat used to prepare foods for meals like school lunch and breakfast. It's a similar plan to that of the Obama administration's Health, Hunger Free Kids Act, which required schools to provide more fruits, veggies, whole grains and fat free or low fat milks.
Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack said raising the nutritional standards of school meals is key to children's overall success.
"This is a national security imperative. It's a healthcare imperative for our children. It's an equity issue. It's an educational achievement issue. And it's an economic competitiveness issue," he said.
The new rules are set to roll out over the next several years with the hope that by 2024, 80 percent of grains in schools will be whole.
"School meals happen to be the meals with the highest nutritional value of any meal that children can get outside the home," Vislack said.
However, the plan to increase the health benefits of foods for youth is not universally shared. Advocates for the dairy industry say they are concerned. Some school officials also say the rolled back ingredients will limit which food menu options, which could ultimately push students toward less healthier options.
"Most districts allow students to leave campus. They'll be hitting the convenience stores, the fast-food restaurants," Michael Gasper, nutrition services supervisor for Holmen, Wisconsin school district, said.
These are the headlines you Need 2 Know for Wednesday, Dec. 12, 2018.
Clean water advocate and movie heroine Erin Brockovich is raising red flags over the state of the nation's water supply. She told Cheddar that it's time for the public to take notice of a problem they've largely been ignoring. "The issue has always been there ー we just either haven't talked about it or it hasn't been exposed," Brockovich said.
The Impossible Burger earned its Halal certification on Monday from the Islamic Food and Nutrition Council of America, marking a major milestone on the meat industry disruptor's path to feeding the world. Soon the Impossible Burger will be available in grocery stores, too, for home chefs who want to try their hand at cooking the meatless burger. David Lee, the COO and CFO of Impossible Foods, joined Cheddar to discuss the company's plan to "serve the world."
A.I. robot Sophia is getting a software upgrade, one that will inch her ー and perhaps A.I. ー even closer to humanity. According to her creator, not only will Sophia earn her citizenship, she will reach a level of advancement equal to human beings in roughly five to 10 years.
SpaceX plans to launch an unmanned cargo spacecraft bound for the International Space Station on Tuesday. But the scientific equipment and experiments aboard the ship are actually meant to improve life on Earth, Ken Shields, chief operating officer for the ISS National Laboratory, told Cheddar. With increasing privatization of the aerospace industry, Shields said space on shuttles to ISS is increasingly in-demand, even if the experiments aboard aren't exactly out-of-this-world.
Ignorance is a major impediment in the effort to reverse climate change, said the former chief sustainability officer for the Obama administration. “I think lot of it is lack of awareness, these are topics that a lot of energy nerds like myself have been thinking of for a long time," Christine Harada, the president of i(x) Investments told Cheddar on Wednesday.
Sarah Lewin, associate editor at Space.com, discusses InSight's successful seven month journey to Mars. InSight will drill into the red planet to learn more about its origins and monitor for Marsquakes.
These are the headlines you Need 2 Know for Tuesday, Nov. 27, 2018.
A nasty E.coli outbreak has caused the government to take the extraordinary step of warning Americans to stay away from all romaine lettuce in any form ahead of the Thanksgiving holiday, and experts are praising regulators for issuing such a sweeping alert ー even though it will affect the Thanksgiving holiday meal prep of millions of families and restaurants.
These are the headlines you Need 2 Know.
