OBAMA TO CONTROL SCHOOL VENDING MACHINES - SWEETNESS & LIGHT
Excerpt - From, appropriately enough, the 'Politics' section of the New York Times:

New Guidelines Planned on School Vending Machines

By RON NIXON
February 20, 2012

Washington - The government's attempt to reduce childhood obesity is moving from the school cafeteria to the vending machines.



The Obama administration is working on setting nutritional standards for foods that children can buy outside the cafeteria. With students eating 19 percent to 50 percent of their daily food at school, the administration says it wants to ensure that what they eat contributes to good health and smaller waistlines. The proposed rules are expected within the next few weeks...

Efforts to restrict the food that schoolchildren eat outside the lunchroom have long been controversial...

Why should children, or for that matter, anyone else get to choose what kind of food they can buy with their own money? Choice is only for abortion.

No details of the proposed guidelines have been released, but health advocates and snack food and soft drink industry representatives predict that the rules will be similar to those for the government's school lunch program, which reduced amounts of sugar, salt and fat.

And never mind that these laws are emanating from the White House, and probably the unelected First Lady, and not Congress.

Those rules set off a fight between parents and health advocates on one side, who praised the standards, and the food industry, which argued that some of the proposals went too far.

Yes, it's the parents against the food industry - Big Snacks. Not the government against kids and parents.

Members of Congress stepped in to block the administration from limiting the amount of potatoes children could be served and to allow schools to continue to count tomato paste on a pizza as a serving of vegetables...

Where does Congress get off limiting the power of the First Lady like that?

Nancy Huehnergarth, executive director of the New York State Healthy Eating and Physical Activity Alliance in Millwood, N.Y., said she expected a similar fight over the vending machine rules.

"I think the food and beverage industry is going to fight tooth and nail over these rules," Ms. Huehnergarth said...

Everyone else will be tickled pink to have another freedom taken away.

By the way, how long will it before before it is illegal to sell 'unhealthy' snacks within so many thousand feet of a school?

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