No wonder so many Americans eat iceberg lettuce, and put added sugar in bread.

And for all the flaws of the food pyramid, I can remember a time before that when it was even worse. We had the "Basic Four" food groups: meat, dairy, fruit+vegetables, and grains.

You aren't hurting yourself by eating lettuce, but it's a missed opportunity to do so much more for your diet. See the difference for yourself.

https://www.nutritionvalue.org/Lettuce%2C_raw%2C_iceberg_%28...

https://www.nutritionvalue.org/Spinach%2C_raw_nutritional_va...

But I'm sure the reason kids threw away fruits and vegetables because they were terrible; not necessarily because they were healthy. I don't know if it's a low value put on food or cost-cutting...I'm sure both are related. You can see this in places other than schools, outside of every corporate meeting is a tray of terrible honeydew and cantaloupe. Most lettuce and tomato don't really have flavor but seem to leach off-flavors. In my personal experience, when I find out someone says they don't like a certain food about half the time it's because they've never had a good example of it.

It's difficult because fresh food spoils so much more quickly than other, cheaper, and less healthy foods. But what's crazy is that today we have way better technology than most of human history to make even the foods most prone to spoilage cheaper an accessible...it's just relative to frozen pizza and ketchup it's more expensive.

Ha! I suppose fruit roll ups[1] are also "fruit" then right?

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fruit_roll_up

One thing I've noticed is that a huge percentage of the American population had been tricked into thinking that fruit juice is healthy.

It isn't healthy. It is soda with some vitamins tossed in as far as the body is concerned.

I fully blame the US government for this. Even liberal cities that pass soda tax laws ignore fruit juice, because hippies with a naturalistic fallacy are a powerful voting bloc on the Democratic party.

I would say that MOST toddlers I see drink several juices a day.

For my kids, it was always a treat, and served incredibly watered down, as in 1 part juice to 6 parts water. So sweet that they don't even know that.

Insanity.

I also see lots of parents offering "fruit snack" candies to their kids as if that's a legitimate substitute for actual fruit.

Don't even get me started on breakfast cereal.

Our milkshakes will have other additives such as malt, vanilla extract, and some sweetener.

In 2011, USDA tried to improve the school lunch requirements involving pizza sauce being a vegetable, but Congress blocked it all in an appropriations bill: https://www.congress.gov/bill/112th-congress/house-bill/2112...

The USDA is now prohibited from not treating pizza sauce as a vegetable, at the behest of corporate food companies like ConAgra.

https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2011/11/15/142360146/pi...

Not only do we get the cookbook for parents, but we are also offered free lectures about nutrition and healthy eating for children. That is an offer all first time parents get. So you can go in the evening and listen to a nutritional expert talk about what sort of food is good for children.

I remember the nutritional expert that held a lecture for me was really cool. She said, that to her, there was no bad food. Instead it was about how much you ate of different kinds of foods. She wanted to emphasize the the problem for most people is that they eat the wrong quantities of different types of foods.

E.g. she mentioned how we eat too much red meat, but that we should not cut it out entirely because it contains many useful things such as iron. Eat red meat once or twice a week I think she said.

And this is the real kicker. Norway is a relatively affluent country with a comprehensive social safety net and a relatively homogenous culture.

Here in the US, we have too many children living in poverty, often with single parents and broken families, who would never bring their own lunchbox in the first place. School lunch is a necessity, otherwise a lot of kids would go hungry and not be able to learn anything.

Norway also doesn't have a huge domestic agriculture sector with outsized political power, and school lunch is a really nice subsidy for them as well.

Norwegian food culture is in fact rather primitive. The only reason we are somewhat healthy is because we don't eat that much sweets and fried stuff, and we tend to eat primarily whole grain.

> Here in the US, we have too many children living in poverty, often with single parents and broken families, who would never bring their own lunchbox in the first place. School lunch is a necessity, otherwise a lot of kids would go hungry and not be able to learn anything.

I get that, but they might already struggle given what I've seen American school lunches look like. Also one need to teach parents how to cook healthy food. It doesn't help that they get something healthy in school if they just eat junk at home.

> Norway also doesn't have a huge domestic agriculture sector with outsized political power, and school lunch is a really nice subsidy for them as well.

Hahaha, then you don't know Norwegian politics ;-P We have a whole political party just for farmers. Farmers get more subsidies than anywhere else in the world I think here. They got very strong influence. This is tied to our history and identity. Farmers manage to project this idea they they are the sole of the nation and that food from any other country is scary and dangerous.

I would claim the issue in the US isn't your agricultural sector but the political clout of the food processors. Fast food chains, grocery store chains and makers of food products don't have that much influence in Norwegian politics. But they seem to have a lot of influence in American politics. Anyone with money seems to have.

Farmers in Norway don't have influence due to money but more from an emotional stand point. They appeal to basic emotions. We are a country which has historically suffered a lot of food shortages and so there is an ingrained belief that we need to be self sufficient. There is also an element of xenophobia. That foreign food is full of anti-biotics, hormons, e-coli, salmonella etc. Which is partially true but not as dangerous as people make it.

It wasn't until grade 11-12 or something that we sometimes started going out and getting burgers for lunch....

This seems reasonable.

I remember seeing 'Supersize me' where kids were fed with junk food (e.g. pizza, chocolate bars, sodas) at school. Is that representative of American schools or did they pick the worst ones to make their point?

I think they maybe had deserts like pudding sometimes. There were no sodas or junk food available at all. The drink choices were 2% milk, chocolate milk, or water.

What I do remember is the food seemed fairly low quality. Canned and frozen packaged stuff, never anything resembling fresh. Every kid got the exact same meal unless you had some medical exemption.

In high school there were some bad choices available in the menu. There were soda and junk food vending machines, but they weren't part of the normal cafeteria and I never had money for them. While there were unhealthy options, there were also many healthy options and you simply bought what you wanted. The freshness was maybe a step up from elementary school.

I think there may have been efforts to remove the vending machines since my time there.

I read a bunch of years ago in Branded by Alissa Quart of American schools where soda giants would fund equipment for the sports teams and provide free soda for the cafeteria. So the school would both have to pay for their own drinks in the cafeteria and refuse sponsorship of the sports team to avoid being involved with soda the companies. It just makes economic sense in that case to let the soda company rope the kids in.

It's been a while since I read it, and I can't verify the truth. For me, it sounds like schools should have no part in getting kids addicted to soda.

I think the corporate sponsorship you talk about here also means that the pressure to fund schools properly through taxes are taken away. It gets too easy to avoid taxes by getting others to pay.

I had a great High School class in genetics that would not have been possible without large donations of money and equipment from a local biotech company.

I have fewer problems with companies donating science equipment, computers, and the like. There have been occasional issues with corporate donated history books though...

I think at my school it was because staff wanted them, so why not have them available for the kids too? I don't think much thought was given to it, and even if there were it would have been framed as a matter of personal responsibility. Adults there would have not thought of their responsibility to teach children good eating habits -- that was for the parents.

School lunches have certainly declined over the years. Continued relaxation of nutrition standards[1] doesn't help.

[0]https://www.usd497.org/cms/lib/KS01906981/Centricity/Domain/...

[1]https://www.usda.gov/sites/default/files/documents/secretary...

EDIT: Okay, since I'm not on mobile now, relevant link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_Size_Me#Counter-claims

I personally have lost 55 lbs since January 25th of this year and McDonalds hamburgers and fudge sundaes have been a meal frequently.

It's true weight is very often a negative health indicator because of the toxic nature of the diet that results in weight gain. However, losing weight is not always a sign of being more healthy.

Shutting down your liver, clogging your arteries, and generally filling your soft tissue and fat storage with toxins is not healthy even if you appear to be losing weight.

Let's clear one thing up first: aside from a few issues like joint stress, it's not weight in general that's the problem; it's body fat. If you're a power athlete with significant muscle mass, you're going to be able to carry a lot of weight and still be perfectly healthy as long as it's lean weight. Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson shouldn't worry about his weight, despite having a BMI that's technically in the obese category. If you have a high weight for your height and you don't look like a professional wrestler, you should definitely be concerned about your weight.

Aside from the problems caused directly by excess body fat, carrying around excess body fat also makes it far more difficult and far riskier to exercise, which means all your other health indicators are going to go down south. Even mental health is pretty strongly influenced by exercise. Also, excess body fat is a far more difficult problem to solve.

I would say this is putting the cart before the horse. It's not excess body fat that is the source of health problems. It's the lifestyle (diet and movement) that leads to excess body fat (as one of the many symptoms of growing health problems) from choices.

In other words, baldness, obesity, sluggishness, headaches, etc... are not the source of health problems - they are the symptoms.

(Though one imagines that if one is not willing to change one's diet or exercise habits to lose weight, the odds of them willing to do it to lower blood pressure or other such indicators seems low too.)

To prove a point a few years back, I ate nothing but pizza and diet Pepsi for several weeks and lost weight. 2 supermarket pizzas was something like 1800 calories.

What point did this prove? Weight is hardly the sole determinant of health.

Phentermine made it a lot easier because I didn't feel hungry, even when I was. But other than that, the same techniques applied: I used a calorie counter and tried to stick to the recommendation that it gave.

After using it a month or 2, I realized that its numbers were slightly high for me, and cut my max allowed calories a little further and started losing weight.

If you're wondering what your number is, the easiest way is probably just to follow what some tool tells you (I used Weight Watchers, then SparkPeople) and adjust the calories according to whether you are losing weight or not.

One caution: There is a rather large gap where you go from gaining weight to maintaining weight to losing weight. The area where you maintain weight is pretty broad. Finding that area is the first step, then slowly removing some calories until you start losing is the key, IMO. If you go too fast, you might remove too many calories and actually make it harder to lose weight than it should be. Your body will try to compensate for lack of calories.

1) Eat on regular intervals. Don't starve yourself, but don't overeat. Typically you stop while you are a tiny bit hungry. The body is a bit slow on registering that you've had enough.

2) Cut out all sugary stuff, chocolate, ice cream, candy.

If you live in the US, it might be harder. My experience from living in the US was that it was hard to stay healthy there because 1) Almost all food contains some sugar 2) Served portions are usually way too large. And you buy things in too large quantities.

This means you might have to focus on cooking food from scratch at home to avoid the added sugar, and getting too large portions.

Don't cook larger portions to have left overs for later. You'll just eat more.

But if you are like me and can't be bothered to make food yourself, then buy EXPENSIVE food. This sounds silly but the thing is that when you buy cheap food, it doesn't taste well unless it is unhealthy.

Healthy food that tastes good is often expensive food. If you go to nice restaurants you tend to get smaller and healthier portions.

I waste a lot of money on food this way but it is just a trade off I've made. I rather waste money than get more unhealthy.

http://www.thetraveltester.com/wp-content/uploads/mos-burger...

When you meet foreign travelers, ask them what they think about US serving sizes. Many of them find it shocking.

Pizza wasn't uncommon but it wasn't like take-out pizza, it was a real cheap basic version that had much less grease and fat. They would on rare occasions make 'real' pizza or have some kind of 'real' food that people would devour, but in general the lunch food was a grade or two lower in quality than the cheapest shit you can buy at walmart. In many schools it is literally the same food/supplier as our prison food so all of it was somewhat questionable in nutrient content.

Also the school breakfast programs were catastrophic, in my opinion. Again, no real food, just packaged donuts and danishes and sugar-laden cereals. It was arguably better when we had snack time instead, with milk and a bag of pretzels or Goldfish and a piece of fruit.

None of these are healthy staples!

Healthy staples are beans and whole grains.

Compared to sugar-laced and processed frozen foods that replaced them, anything home-cooked would be wildly more healthy.

I did forget to mention the mountains of C-ration style canned vegetables and fruits that were also present.

Pizza has a normal lunch. But chocolate bars, no.

In the US, we don't like to fully fund education with tax money, which means our public schools need other sources of revenue to fill the gap. Junk food vending is a large and crucial funding source.

Both school and pre-school make it sound like they don't allow sweets, so it's very disingenuous. At least they're not served lemonade daily for lunch, and the afternoon snack is fruit.

Most candy is cheap to buy in volume and you just discard it rather than handing it to customers. Everything looks fine in the books. You just don't have as many customers in the shop as the accounting books says you have. You will have to pay tax on the laundered money but that can be a small price for making the money fully legal and usable for e.g. house loans.

All the adults who were deprived in childhood.

Norwegians driving across the border to avoid the sugar tax?

Norwegians

How frequently is this curriculum revised and how are updates communicated to children after they graduate from that course/class/curriculum?

I'm mostly curiously because of how dietary research has changed and because there is little consensus on what a "bad" diet is. Almost everyone will agree to avoid sugar and processed food, but that's about where it ends. You also have to factor in individual genetics and lifestyle, although perhaps less so in countries like Norway where there would be a common genetic ancestry.

As far as I know the debate about health eating has centered around how much carbo hydrates we should eat and the role of fat. But I think eating less processed food, more whole grain and less sugar has always been accepted wisdom about healthy eating.

We Norwegians probably eat a bit much bread and potatoes and should probably eat more vegtables and alternatives such as beans, lentils etc. However I think we've been fairly good at avoiding too much sweets in the diet.

There would be a very small amount of praise from the right, a very small amount of jokes about her being a phone-it-in first lady from the left, and both would be overshadowed by an overwhelming amount of indifference by everyone.

It's just an assumption to say that both sides are the same. Barbara and Laura Bush, for example, were not demonized like Hillary Clinton and Michelle Obama.

Moreover, generally democrats don’t stoop as low as republicans. Republicans attacked Chelsea Clinton when she was like 11—Rush Limbaugh was calling her ugly. Can you imagine any democrats calling Barron ugly or something as vicious? How about how Fox News harassed Obama’s kids? You’d never see that on CNN. Republicanism is a morally bankrupt ideology.

In Norway none of this is very controversial, and fast food companies have little political influence. Money in Norwegian politics is quite restricted. Not sure how it is now, but usually you could not pay for political TV ads.

If you wanted to get on TV you would have to join a political TV debate of which there are usually a lot of.

The issue is harming children's nutrition to score political points.

The description is in Norwegian but I can give a quick summary: It gives recipes for breakfast, lunch boxes, food for hiking trips (hiking is very common in Norway), dinner, supper and snacks. The recipes are simple and tasty. There are discussion of what is healthy and what one should eat.

It has different authors. One of the co-authors is Rune Blomhoff who is nutritional science professor at university of Oslo and one of the leading researchers in the world on anti-oxydants.

In our book there are discussion for each dish what part of the food making the kids can participate in. It is to encourage children to learn about food themselves and get used to making healthy food themselves.

Do kids bring carrots?

Knowing what we know about the long term impact of high-sugar diets, is it really that much of a stretch to limit intake?

If you dump chocolate in your kids food box every day then the employees will simply talk to you about why it is a bad idea. They are not going to stop you or take away the chocolate.

This is also about consideration towards other parents and children. If one child has lots of candy in their food box you make the other kids envious and they start complaining to their parents about why they don't get candy. That is why it is good to have common guidelines on what kind of food parents should put in the lunch box of their kids.

I wonder when the state will ban sugar from the homes too. These people don't understand what they're asking for - like the frog in boiling water.

Should 5 year-olds have voting rights, access to jobs or the ability to buy alcohol and tobacco?

It is just about people agreeing to common sensible rules for the benefit of everybody. It is about showing consideration for other people.

Does Norway also ban fruit juice?

I see what you're saying, but considering the exploding rates of obesity for children in the U.S., maybe dialling down some of that "fun" is necessary. There is overwhelming evidence that overconsumption of sugar is very unhealthy and fits the profile for addiction. I started looking at sugar the way I look at alcohol: to be consumed in minimal amounts, if at all. If one takes that view, measures such as those in Norway don't seem that extreme anymore.

Yes.

> and fits the profile for addiction

Sugar doesn't really fit the profile for addiction, which requires tolerance, preoccupation, seeking, and not stopping even though you know it's harmful.

Sugar hits maybe one or two of those, but rarely all four.

It sure does. Tolerance manifests itself as insulin resistance. Preoccupation starts as soon as the blood glucose level drops, which happens at regular intervals on carbohydrate-rich diets, manifesting itself as cravings. Seeking is just a trip to the vending machine, and choosing the crepes and the donuts over the eggs and salads. Not stopping even though you know it's harmful? The struggle to fix one's diet is one of the hardest and most likely to fail as far as addictions go, as can be seen in the ever-increasing diabetes and obesity rates in the general population. It's certainly not because of a lack of awareness, even though a lot of people (and doctors) still think low-fat diets are the key to success.

Sugar doesn't come close.

While I will defer to your experience with working with addicts, with respect I would suggest that the nature of your work may lead you to underestimate the addictive properties of sugar.

I am not claiming it compares with alcohol, meth, or crack cocaine addiction, but I think it is not unreasonable to compare its intensity to, say, coffee addiction. Except that in the case of sugar, the consequences can be chronic disease and premature death.

Research shows that sugar affects the brain reward pathways in a way similar to other drugs [1]. This contributes to its addictive properties in addition to those caused by the metabolic disruptions brought about by insulin resistance.

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23719144

[2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2235907/

[3] https://addictionresource.com/addiction/sugar-addiction/

Its pretty easy to give up sugar for many people, for months at a time. Going back is probably laziness (easy availability, nostalgia) and not a physical compulsion.

Its common to throw words around like addiction when better words exist. Like habitual, or accustomed, or conditioned.

It's also common for attitudes to change very slowly with respect to something that has been around forever, that is available everywhere, and that can be safely used in moderation. It may be hard to accept that 'sugar addiction' is not an exaggeration; sugar brings to mind Valentine's Day, Halloween, and mom's apple pie, while addiction is associated with laying in the street, fatal overdoses, and ruined lives.

I certainly don't mean to say that everyone who likes sweets is automatically addicted to sugar. I use the term 'addiction' not to throw it around lightly, but because it is being used with its literal meaning by the medical professionals conducting said research, and because the usage is supported by the evidence (as can be seen in the links provided). That sugar addiction is being felt much less intensely than addictions to hard drugs, or that it can be overcome more easily, doesn't mean it doesn't fit the definition. Moreover, at a societal level, its consequences are just as dire (arguably, more so).

So I think you are overreacting a tad here ;-) Also keep in mind this isn't exclusively a government thing. We have meeting were parents were the pre-school comes with suggestions and parents come with suggestions as well and people agree together on common rules.

"And talk about taking the fun out of any celebrations."

You can't have fun if there aren't sweets? That is sad? In a school there are lots of kids. If you celebrate with sweets for every single birthday through the year, and then in addition have your celebrations at home with sweets that ends up being a LOT of sugar.

I think you are trivializing the problem with sugar. Kids don't NEED processed sugar. There are lots of other things they can enjoy such as fruits, smoothies, yogurts and other good food.

The idea that "sugar" === "fun" is exactly the misconception they are trying to fix.