Michelle Obama Announces New National Nutrition Standards

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School lunches have spent a lot of time in the spotlight lately. First a spending bill considered pizza a vegetable, then California schools that had successfully provided healthier lunches found kids weren't eating the new food, and lunch ladies in Chicago protested to ask for changes to improve the new healthier system. What's next? The announcement of changing nutrition standards for school meals nationwide.

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According to The New York Times, the Obama administration recently announced the new federal nutrition standards for school meals. Michelle Obama and Agricultural Secretary Tom Vilsack released the standards at Parklawn Elementary School in Alexandria, Virginia.

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The new rules are a step in the first lady's campaign to reduce the number of obese children in America. She stated that parents are constantly trying to make sure their kids eat healthy food throughout the day, so "when we are putting in all that effort the last thing we want is for our hard work to be undone each day in the school cafeteria."

While this marks the first change to the national school lunch program in 15 years, the Huffington Post points out that there are both positive and negative aspects of the new standards. Pizza stills counts in the vegetable category because it has tomato paste. And Congress also failed to reduce starchy foods, such as potatoes, in the new standards. Finally, the new standards still allow chocolate milk, a product that is considerably less healthy than its unflavored counterpart.

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So what's good about the new nutrition standards? They enforce a policy to provide fruits and vegetables everyday, increase whole-grain offerings, and reduce saturated fat, trans fat, and sodium in lunchtime meals. Additionally, the program gets rid of a previous method for lunch planning called "nutrient standard menu planning." The system allowed schools to focus on specific individual nutrient requirements, leading to strange menu additions like animal cracker cookies for breakfast because they contained fortified white flour (satisfying the requirement for iron).

While the new standards promise an overall improvement in school lunch nutrition, the program is underfunded, adding only an additional six cents per free meal. Another problem is that schools that have already tried to follow healthier standards in cities like Los Angeles and Chicago have found it difficult to provide healthier meals that kids will actually eat.

What do you think: Will the new nutrition initiatives succeed in providing healthier meals to children across the country?