SiLLy_AnGe
this is for my essay
thanks for your answer
Answer
Are School Lunches Killing Americaâs Kids?
Chef Ann Cooper Dishes on Unhealthy Eating
Sheâs cooked backstage for the Grateful Dead. Sheâs whipped up meals for star attendees at music and film festivals. Sheâs created culinary sensations at high-end restaurants and cruise ships. But it wasnât until chef Ann Cooper traded those glam gigs for the job of school district lunch lady that she kick-started a national food fight over public school meals, which she says are killing our childrenâ¦
These days, instead of preparing delicacies for sophisticated palates in expensive eateries, Ann Cooper schleps to an austere industrial kitchen before sunrise each weekday morning. From 5 a.m. on, the pace is nonstop as she guides kitchen employees through the fine art of preparing healthy, kid-friendly recipes from her latest book, Lunch Lessons: Changing the Way We Feed Our Children (HarperCollins, 2006).
Cooperâs latest culinary claim to fame stems as much from what she refuses to cook as it does from what she insists on preparing: fresh, wholesome and â whenever possible â organic eats served daily to nearly 5,000 Berkeley, California public school students.
âIâm trying to change the food we feed kids and actively educate children and their parents,â says Cooper, one of the first 50 women certified as an executive chef by the American Culinary Federation.
Each weekday morning, Cooper spends the pre-dawn hours in the district kitchen playing a combination of drill sergeant and chef. A typical day might find her simultaneously presiding over an army-sized batch of homemade organic marinara sauce while ensuring that scores of chunky, bright green broccoli spears donât get overcooked. (Kids gobble them up like candy, she says, if they remain crunchy and not soggy.) As ingredients simmer, Cooperâs morning is on high boil. Her cell phone rarely leaves her ear. Has any of her staff called in sick? Have any trucks broken down? Will tomorrowâs ingredients arrive? Will deliveries make it to all 17 schools on time? When lunch is over, the pace continues with staff meetings and office work that often keeps her on the clock 12 hours a day.
So why does she do it?
âBecause weâre killing our kids with food,â Cooper tells LifeScript, citing recent statistics suggesting that todayâs seven-year-olds will be the first generation of children to live shorter lives than their parents.
âOf the children born in 2000, one in two African Americans and Hispanics and one in three Caucasians will have diabetes in their lifetime, with most of them getting the disease before they graduate from high school,â Cooper warns. She blames much of it on the food fed to children at school and the lack of nutrition education.
âWe could have forty to forty-five percent of all school-age children insulin-dependent. It couldnât be worse,â she says. âItâs all about the food we feed them. Weâre getting too fat. Weâre eating too much crap.â
Cooper says among her main goals in writing Lunch Lessons was to provide readers with an easy-to-digest primer on childhood nutrition and to bring nutrition education and healthy foods back into public schools. But without lunch ladies, who were a regular school presence before budget cuts, healthy cafeteria food is hard to come by. Today a typical school lunch entrée is pre-processed and mass-produced at off-campus facilities.
Cooper recalls her shock when she first witnessed some of the government-sanctioned fare that now passes for nutritious food. âIt made me cry,â she says of the meals she saw. Among them: cellophane-wrapped faux grilled cheese sandwiches with brown imitation grill marks stamped on the sides, and pre-packaged turnovers stuffed with hard-to-pronounce preservatives and additives. Itâs no wonder 78% of all school lunches fail to meet basic USDA nutrition standards, Cooper says.
But without an infusion of cash, most public schools canât afford to serve the nutritious food Cooper cooks. In Berkeley, the shift to good eats is underwritten in part by an annual grant from chef Alice Waterâs Chez Panisse Foundation. Nationwide, however, most schools have less than a dollar a day to spend on each student meal once payroll and overhead are covered. And with millions of children getting their main meals from school, the need for change is urgent.
Cooper argues that, despite budget woes, we canât afford not to make the changes. Diet-related illness already costs the U.S. $200 billion annually. âIf we donât do something,â Cooper warns, âweâre going to become an entire nation on medication.â
To that end, Cooper suggests five steps you can take to make a difference in your familyâs health and your own.
1. If you donât do so yet, begin cooking â even a few days a week â at home. Healthy cooking doesnât require hours in the kitchen. Nutritious meals can be fast and easy, Cooper assures, especially when youâre cooking for a family and not an entire school district.
2. Save time by dropping the ingredients into a crockpot, which safely slow-cooks your meals over several hours while youâre busy with other tasks.
3. When you cook, prepare more than you need for one meal. âIf youâre going to roast a chicken, roast three,â Cooper says. Then make chicken soup and chicken salad, and freeze the leftovers. âEvery meal doesnât have to be a big deal. Just start by cooking sometimes and think of cooking meals that can be stretched,â she suggests.
4. Find out what your local public schools are doing to promote nutrition in the classroom and in the cafeteria. In Berkeley, this means offering cooking classes and playground gardening programs that allow children to plant, grow and eat fresh fruits and vegetables. Lunch Lessons provides a number of easy suggestions for schools to get on the right nutrition track. âIf weâre going to change childrenâs relationship with food, we have to give them hands-on experience as well as curriculum,â Cooper says.
5. Take a stand for nutrition. Email or call your congressional representatives to tell them school lunches need more funding. Talk to your neighbors and community. âWe spend more on two pairs of shoes than we spend on feeding a school child for a year,â Cooper says. âWe should double or triple what we spend on school lunches. We just havenât made it a priority.â
Are School Lunches Killing Americaâs Kids?
Chef Ann Cooper Dishes on Unhealthy Eating
Sheâs cooked backstage for the Grateful Dead. Sheâs whipped up meals for star attendees at music and film festivals. Sheâs created culinary sensations at high-end restaurants and cruise ships. But it wasnât until chef Ann Cooper traded those glam gigs for the job of school district lunch lady that she kick-started a national food fight over public school meals, which she says are killing our childrenâ¦
These days, instead of preparing delicacies for sophisticated palates in expensive eateries, Ann Cooper schleps to an austere industrial kitchen before sunrise each weekday morning. From 5 a.m. on, the pace is nonstop as she guides kitchen employees through the fine art of preparing healthy, kid-friendly recipes from her latest book, Lunch Lessons: Changing the Way We Feed Our Children (HarperCollins, 2006).
Cooperâs latest culinary claim to fame stems as much from what she refuses to cook as it does from what she insists on preparing: fresh, wholesome and â whenever possible â organic eats served daily to nearly 5,000 Berkeley, California public school students.
âIâm trying to change the food we feed kids and actively educate children and their parents,â says Cooper, one of the first 50 women certified as an executive chef by the American Culinary Federation.
Each weekday morning, Cooper spends the pre-dawn hours in the district kitchen playing a combination of drill sergeant and chef. A typical day might find her simultaneously presiding over an army-sized batch of homemade organic marinara sauce while ensuring that scores of chunky, bright green broccoli spears donât get overcooked. (Kids gobble them up like candy, she says, if they remain crunchy and not soggy.) As ingredients simmer, Cooperâs morning is on high boil. Her cell phone rarely leaves her ear. Has any of her staff called in sick? Have any trucks broken down? Will tomorrowâs ingredients arrive? Will deliveries make it to all 17 schools on time? When lunch is over, the pace continues with staff meetings and office work that often keeps her on the clock 12 hours a day.
So why does she do it?
âBecause weâre killing our kids with food,â Cooper tells LifeScript, citing recent statistics suggesting that todayâs seven-year-olds will be the first generation of children to live shorter lives than their parents.
âOf the children born in 2000, one in two African Americans and Hispanics and one in three Caucasians will have diabetes in their lifetime, with most of them getting the disease before they graduate from high school,â Cooper warns. She blames much of it on the food fed to children at school and the lack of nutrition education.
âWe could have forty to forty-five percent of all school-age children insulin-dependent. It couldnât be worse,â she says. âItâs all about the food we feed them. Weâre getting too fat. Weâre eating too much crap.â
Cooper says among her main goals in writing Lunch Lessons was to provide readers with an easy-to-digest primer on childhood nutrition and to bring nutrition education and healthy foods back into public schools. But without lunch ladies, who were a regular school presence before budget cuts, healthy cafeteria food is hard to come by. Today a typical school lunch entrée is pre-processed and mass-produced at off-campus facilities.
Cooper recalls her shock when she first witnessed some of the government-sanctioned fare that now passes for nutritious food. âIt made me cry,â she says of the meals she saw. Among them: cellophane-wrapped faux grilled cheese sandwiches with brown imitation grill marks stamped on the sides, and pre-packaged turnovers stuffed with hard-to-pronounce preservatives and additives. Itâs no wonder 78% of all school lunches fail to meet basic USDA nutrition standards, Cooper says.
But without an infusion of cash, most public schools canât afford to serve the nutritious food Cooper cooks. In Berkeley, the shift to good eats is underwritten in part by an annual grant from chef Alice Waterâs Chez Panisse Foundation. Nationwide, however, most schools have less than a dollar a day to spend on each student meal once payroll and overhead are covered. And with millions of children getting their main meals from school, the need for change is urgent.
Cooper argues that, despite budget woes, we canât afford not to make the changes. Diet-related illness already costs the U.S. $200 billion annually. âIf we donât do something,â Cooper warns, âweâre going to become an entire nation on medication.â
To that end, Cooper suggests five steps you can take to make a difference in your familyâs health and your own.
1. If you donât do so yet, begin cooking â even a few days a week â at home. Healthy cooking doesnât require hours in the kitchen. Nutritious meals can be fast and easy, Cooper assures, especially when youâre cooking for a family and not an entire school district.
2. Save time by dropping the ingredients into a crockpot, which safely slow-cooks your meals over several hours while youâre busy with other tasks.
3. When you cook, prepare more than you need for one meal. âIf youâre going to roast a chicken, roast three,â Cooper says. Then make chicken soup and chicken salad, and freeze the leftovers. âEvery meal doesnât have to be a big deal. Just start by cooking sometimes and think of cooking meals that can be stretched,â she suggests.
4. Find out what your local public schools are doing to promote nutrition in the classroom and in the cafeteria. In Berkeley, this means offering cooking classes and playground gardening programs that allow children to plant, grow and eat fresh fruits and vegetables. Lunch Lessons provides a number of easy suggestions for schools to get on the right nutrition track. âIf weâre going to change childrenâs relationship with food, we have to give them hands-on experience as well as curriculum,â Cooper says.
5. Take a stand for nutrition. Email or call your congressional representatives to tell them school lunches need more funding. Talk to your neighbors and community. âWe spend more on two pairs of shoes than we spend on feeding a school child for a year,â Cooper says. âWe should double or triple what we spend on school lunches. We just havenât made it a priority.â
I work out every day, seeing muscle definition but no weight loss?!?
breezyFbab
So here's the deal, I have been working out every day for about 9 months, I have definitely noticed great definition in my legs and arms but I am continuing to gain weight or just maintain it. I weigh about 117(on a good day) to 121lbs. I know that is not bad but I'm 5'4 and my fat goes to all the WRONG places. I feel sick when I haven't eaten-and feel like i'm about to pass out-so I snack..also I'm a college student so dinner is anything from..pizza, steaks, hamburgers(boxed food with meat, spaghetti) chicken(sandwiches, pasta) and so on..and I have to eat around 9 every night because I work from 3-8 mon-thurs.ALSO I am a receptionist so I am sitting on my ass for 5 hours daily, I TRY to be as active as possible but I can't hardly leave the desk....
What all am I doing wrong and do you have any suggestions?! I've got a little cellulite starting to form on my thigh and I just dread it getting worse...help! oh, and I DONT drink pop and I DONT eat fast food, I drink beer almost every weekend if not a crown and coke (my only acception with pop)...
Answer
Firstly fat is very light and fluffy compared to muscle. Muscle is very compact and when defined, you can gain quite a bit and its surprising on the scale. However, the scale is not measuring your muscle gain and is not accurate.
Now, I don't mean to be snooty, but our fast paced lives have caused a generation of people who don't realize that pizza and hamburgers and boxed pasta are all junk foods. YES, they are junk foods.
If you eliminate all white flower products and fried foods, you will get lean.
Here is a new one. Fat does not make fat in the body. That is a myth.
Pizza, pasta, and any fried potatoes or chips or anything that converts to sugars easily causes your body to produce triglycerides in the blood.
Triglycerides are what cause that fat surrounding your middle that you can't seem to get rid of.
Its the kind of fat Sumo wrestlers work on by creating triglycerides by overeating lots of white rice and then sleep so that they do nothing but store it all as fat.
You need to look up recipes and learn how to prepare your own food. You need to include 7 to 9 servings of raw fruits and vegetables in your diet. Meat is fine, but stay away from white flower products, white potatoes of any kind or anything that is converted to sugars by the body easily, because you will not burn it as energy, you will store it as fat and get hungrier because you didn't eat right.
About beer. Its the LIGHT beer that causes weight gain more than a hardy regular hoppy or barley beer. No corn beers like Mexican beers because they are brewed from corn syrup. No bud or coors because they too, are loaded with sugar. Get a good carb beer like Heffe Veis or something really healthy if your gunna drink a beer, ok?
Stick with carbohydrates that are harder to digest, like grains or breads that have sprouts, eat raw nuts, seeds. Athletes that work out know to make these awesome protein shakes that include flax seeds and other really healthy stuff. They get lean that way.
Take care, you sound like a down to earth no nonsense person who may not want to change your eating habits because you hate anything green! LOL.
Firstly fat is very light and fluffy compared to muscle. Muscle is very compact and when defined, you can gain quite a bit and its surprising on the scale. However, the scale is not measuring your muscle gain and is not accurate.
Now, I don't mean to be snooty, but our fast paced lives have caused a generation of people who don't realize that pizza and hamburgers and boxed pasta are all junk foods. YES, they are junk foods.
If you eliminate all white flower products and fried foods, you will get lean.
Here is a new one. Fat does not make fat in the body. That is a myth.
Pizza, pasta, and any fried potatoes or chips or anything that converts to sugars easily causes your body to produce triglycerides in the blood.
Triglycerides are what cause that fat surrounding your middle that you can't seem to get rid of.
Its the kind of fat Sumo wrestlers work on by creating triglycerides by overeating lots of white rice and then sleep so that they do nothing but store it all as fat.
You need to look up recipes and learn how to prepare your own food. You need to include 7 to 9 servings of raw fruits and vegetables in your diet. Meat is fine, but stay away from white flower products, white potatoes of any kind or anything that is converted to sugars by the body easily, because you will not burn it as energy, you will store it as fat and get hungrier because you didn't eat right.
About beer. Its the LIGHT beer that causes weight gain more than a hardy regular hoppy or barley beer. No corn beers like Mexican beers because they are brewed from corn syrup. No bud or coors because they too, are loaded with sugar. Get a good carb beer like Heffe Veis or something really healthy if your gunna drink a beer, ok?
Stick with carbohydrates that are harder to digest, like grains or breads that have sprouts, eat raw nuts, seeds. Athletes that work out know to make these awesome protein shakes that include flax seeds and other really healthy stuff. They get lean that way.
Take care, you sound like a down to earth no nonsense person who may not want to change your eating habits because you hate anything green! LOL.
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