First Lady Michelle Obama discusses the childhood obesity epidemic with Jim Lehrer tonight on the PBS Newshour. How do you make healthy changes to your diet when you’re a busy, stressed-out parent? Take juices out of lunch boxes, cook at home a few more times per week, limit TV, and …

We just received the following press release from the Food, Family, Farming Foundation, a nonprofit organization working to make U.S. food systems more nutritious and sustainable. Chef Ann Cooper (a.k.a. the Renegade Lunch Lady) has been working to revamp school foods—including eliminating of processed ingredients, hydrogenated oils, and sugars in favor of more fresh fruits and vegetables and vegetarian entrees. Under Chef Ann’s direction, my daughter’s school here in Colorado has completely revitalized their menu, and so much for the better! (I wouldn’t have allowed her to purchase hot lunch previously; now it’s a great option.) But thousands of schools across the nation have not yet gotten the support or funding they need to implement change, and so it’s important that you speak up now and tell congress to fund healthy school lunches.

The Child Nutrition Act, slated for reauthorization this year, serves up a rare opportunity for healthier funding of school lunches. Chef Ann Cooper, aka the Renegade Lunch Lady, in partnership with Slow Food USA, Roots of Change, and Healthy Schools Campaign, is rallying a million moms and dads to write Congress demanding an additional subsidy of $1 per lunch. Cooper is providing templates of letters requesting a budget increase to underwrite real (not highly processed) food for school kids: fresh fruits and vegetables, whole grains, clean proteins and natural dairy products, with a priority on regionally produced food. This letter-writing campaign launches on the heels of the Obama administration’s proposed $1 billion budget increase for school lunch subsidies. Cooper and her allies say this increase is not enough to feed our children well. more

As a lifelong vegetarian, it has fascinated me to watch the meat vs. no-meat debate ping-pong from the nutritional (can a vegetarian get enough protein?) to the ethical (should we eat meat raised in feedlots?) and the environmental (what’s the impact of raising animals for food?). There are food thinkers who side with ethically raised local meats (Pollan) and those who largely oppose eating animals (Safran Foer), those who have strayed from the vegetarian diet and those who have gone from merely vegetarian to vegan. And then there are the many many “flexitarians” that fall somewhere in between. Most nutrition experts agree that a diet rich in a variety of whole plant foods, with lesser amounts of dairy and meat, can significantly lower risk of heart disease, diabetes, and cancer. A few days ago, I got this email from a friend. more

Most mornings lately, I’ve been tired. Not just sleepy—bone-weary tired. There are a million things I could blame, from a hectic family/work schedule to chronically interrupted sleep (2- and 5-year-olds do not sleep very soundly). In the haze, it’s hard to know what it is I really need. More vitamins? Better exercise? It occurred to me this morning, as I turned up the hot water in the shower for an extra “blast,” that I am simply out of step with the season. Despite the fact that we don’t burrow in mud- and leaf-lined caves and sleep all winter, humans are meant to slow down and rest more in the colder/darker months. And lately I have been expecting myself to do everything as if it were still mid summer with bountiful sunlight and tons of social energy. So when Michael Finkelstein, M.D., got in touch to offer these simple tips for staving off the winter blues, I took note. more

Children’s food allergies have been on the rise for quite some time, with no clear explanation as to why. Some experts blame GMOs, others the timing of introducing foods to kids or the frequency with which we consume certain staples—such as wheat, dairy, soy, and corn. Evidence shows that most kids acquire food allergies within their first couple years of life, which may explain why researchers recently found that kids who started multivitamin supplements earlier (in this case, before age 4) showed a 39 percent reduction in food allergy risk, while older children saw little or no change to allergy risk when taking the same multivitamins. Take away? Multivitamins can in fact help reduce allergy risk, but only if they’re started early.

The Omnivore’s Dilemma: The Secrets Behind What You Eat (Young Readers Edition) hits shelves next week. With it, Pollan hopes to reach a whole new generation of eaters with the same compelling naratives and statistics in the original book—only in a more kid-friendly format. “I think that if were are going to change this food system and get right with our eating in this country it’s going to involve kids eating in a different way, learning more about their food choices, exercising personal responsibility from a position of knowledge rather than all the marketing illusion that’s around,” he said recently in my interview with him about the book. more

I am thrilled to hear today that Organic Valley, the nation’s largest co-op of organic farmers and producers, has been named the milk supplier for the 28,000-student Boulder Valley School District. As reported in DL’s September 09 issue, chef Ann Cooper, a.k.a. Renegade Lunch Lady, has recently focused her prodigious efforts to improve school lunches here in Boulder, and the organic-milk change is the most welcome new element. “School lunch programs across the nation need to make fundamental changes to improve the health and well-being of our children. Unfortunately, public schools are one of the last places where organic milk is usually found,” she says in the press release. “Not only is organic milk produced without antibiotics, synthetic pesticides and hormones, making it healthier for growing children, but Organic Valley milk is healthier for our local community because it’s produced by local family farmers.”

When people ask me what they should “start with” in terms of organic food, I always say dairy … because all that nasty stuff in conventional milk and dairy products can’t ever be washed off, and kids (at least MY kids) drink a LOT of milk. It was the first thing our family switched to organic, and now our schools have the same benefit. If you want to see this happen in YOUR school district, don’t wait: check out Cooper’s Food Family Farming website, with resources such as The Lunch Box tool to help you get something going.

Thankfully, I never had trouble producing enough milk with either of my own kids (now 2 and 5), but I have known a surprising number of women (among the 3-6 million women worldwide) who have had to give up breastfeeding because they failed to produce enough milk. And some part of me always wondered: Was it a lack of trying? The fact that breast feeding can be surprisingly painful at first? But a recent study conducted at the University of Rochester Medical Center points to another potential culprit: dioxins. more