U.S. Children Need More Fruits & Vegetable
According to a new statistics on last Wednesday underscored the need for more vegetables and fruits in the diets of kids in the U.S.A. The Institute of Medicine focused on school-based food programs to demonstrate that a lot of students are consuming too much solid fats and sugars rather than having the required amount of key nutrients from various fruits and vegetables.
Their evaluation focused on especially breakfast and lunch programs at American schools. The study discover that kids aged 5 to 18 ate 50% or less of the vegetables recommended by the American government’s dietary guidelines, and fruits intake was 50% or less than the recommended amount for children 9 to18 years old. The study also revealed that kids take high amounts of sodium and solid fats from different types of fast food items. Virginia Stallings, one of the professors at The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and chair of the committee, said “Most Americans, not just children, are not eating as balanced a diet as we want,” she added, “There are so few times where we have an opportunity to touch every child’s life.”
Tom Vilsack, Secretary of Agriculture by President-elect Barack Obama, said to the USDA, “must place nutrition at the center of all food assistance programs administered by the department.” Officials at the USDA are updating their nutrition and meal supplies used for U.S school breakfast and lunch programs, and looked for suggestions from the Institute of Medicine. These programs are managed by the U.S. Agriculture Department and are put down for reauthorization by Congress in 2009. On the other hand, Jim Weill of the Food Research and Action center said, “School meals are absolutely essential not just to reduce hunger, but to kids’ health,” “Obesity has helped focus attention that school meals should be better.”
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention approximation that 13.9% of kids aged 2 to 5, 18.8% of those aged between 6 to11, and above 17 percent of those 12 to 19 are overweight.
