In 2012, the Obama administration made the National School Lunch Program, which has provided free or reduced-cost meals in more than 100,000 public and non-profit private schools and other child-care institutions nationwide since 1946, into a political football and used beliefs that lacked any scientific basis to mandate what should be served.

Schools and communities went into open revolt. For the children we care most about, those school lunches might be the best meal they got, and those were being replaced by an agenda-based menu that no one wanted to eat.

Since it is the week before an election, a team in New England Journal of Medicine argues that going back to the old lunch program would undermine "progress that has been made to improve the quality of school meals." Number of the these authors that have children eating the meals in this new program: zero. 

Elsie Taveras, MD, MPH, chief of General Pediatrics at MGHfC and a co-author of the NEJM article, says, "The recent politicization of the program and attempts to roll back the improvements that have been made represent to us – as pediatricians and public health practitioners – a threat to children's health, development and academic success." 

What improvements are those, beyond nutritional claims? None. The same arguments that got trans fats banned led next to bans on soda sizes, Happy Meals and now school lunches, but they have had no impact on child health.

First Lady Michelle Obama received a staff briefing about a 2008 Institute of Medicine report which said that children participating in the program were eating few fruits and vegetables – with potatoes accounting for one-third of their vegetables – and consuming high levels of saturated fats and sodium. The resulting 2010 Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act declared potatoes the enemy and mandated fruits, vegetables and whole grains, and limiting calories. Critics argued that if America's poorest children are obese, they don't need free lunches.  If they are instead too thin, they need calories. 

Gradual implementation of the First Lady's standards began in 2012 and the revolt was immediate but not a lot of school officials, food industry representatives and the School Nutrition Association have produced evidence that students were unwilling to accept meals prepared under the new standards, leading to increased waste of uneaten food and reduced participation in the program overall.

They also noted that meeting the new fad-based dietary standards is difficult and has increased operating costs. The 2015 House of Representatives budget resolution includes a waiver that would allow schools with a 6-month net loss in school lunch revenues to return to the old standards. 

Taveras and lead author Jennifer Woo Baidal, MD, MPH – a fellow in pediatric health services research at MGHfC and a pediatric gastroenterologist at Boston Children's Hospital – are siding with Democrats during election season and note the following: 

•  Most of those raising objections to the current standards have an interest in keeping program costs as low as possible and have not documented their claims. In other words, follow the money and declare guilt by association, even if their facts are completely true.  

•  Waste of fruits and vegetables is not a new problem and they found a paper of selected schools where waste had decreased under the new standards and where students were eating greater proportions of the served entrees and vegetables and more fruit. 

•   The decline in participation in the school lunch program is older than the new standards and since the Government Accounting Office report can't say it is due to the new standards, the new standards are better than the old standards. 

•   If kids have no other choice, they will eventually eat the new food. That seems like cynical punishment of America's most vulnerable kids but they are correct. Starving people will eventually eat anything. 

They note that organizations like the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Heart Association, and the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, along with Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack and first lady Michelle Obama, are resistant to any changes to their changes. They instead argue that schools could improve both the quality and acceptability of the meals they serve by collaborating with local chefs, which shows you they are out of touch with schools.  

"Allowing schools to opt out of the new school lunch standards would deny many children access to healthy meals and represent a large step backwards in the efforts to prevent childhood obesity," Woo Baidal says. "Matters of children's health should not be driven by political considerations." Woo Baidal is an instructor in Pediatrics, and Taveras is an associate professor of Pediatrics at Harvard Medical School and an associate professor of Nutrition at Harvard School of Public Health.