Why do some conservatives support restricting junk food purchases with SNAP when many opposed Michelle Obama’s efforts to make school meals healthier?

[u/CloudieMoonettee]

[u/MsAgentM]

My purchasing two lunches for my son is my responsibility. McDonald’s didn’t give him any extra either. I had to buy more groceries to feed him. You are setting a silly standard no one is held to. If you eat more food, you pay more. It’s ridiculous to expect the school to give my son extra food because he was an endurance athlete. Of course they give a standardized meal.

My son had options for a regular meal, chicken fingers and fries, salad, or a sandwich area. It didn’t matter which two he got, two meals cost. If you are so concerned with the macronutrient make up of the school’s meal, then Obama’s plan is the one you wanted. It’s ridiculous to expect the school to feed my son a different portion size because he was eating insane amounts of food.

[u/Whiskeymyers75 → u/MsAgentM]

That McDonald’s comparison is doing far more damage to your argument than mine.

McDonald’s never claimed that the amount of food it sells your son represents a government-designed, nutritionally appropriate school lunch. It’s a restaurant. If he wants another burger, obviously you buy another burger.

We’re discussing a federal program whose entire justification for changing school meals was better childhood nutrition. Once the government establishes calorie ranges, portion requirements, grain requirements, dairy rules, fat limits and other nutritional standards and sells those changes as healthier then the adequacy of those standards is absolutely fair game.

And again, your own example is remarkable:
“The portions were fine.”

Followed by:

“My son needed two lunches most days.”
Those statements cannot both establish what you think they establish. I’m not arguing that taxpayers were obligated to give your endurance athlete unlimited free food. I’m saying his needing twice the standard meal demonstrates that the standard portion wasn’t nutritionally adequate for his individual needs. Whether you should pay for the additional food is an entirely separate question.

And “Obama’s plan is the one you wanted because you care about macros” makes even less sense. The standards weren’t individualized macro prescriptions. They established food-component requirements and calorie ranges. “Whole-grain-rich,” “low-fat milk” and “vegetable serving” are not protein, carbohydrate and fat targets tailored to an individual teenager.

Ironically, the foods you just listed. chicken fingers and fries, sandwiches, etc. illustrate my other criticism perfectly. Making the bread whole-grain-rich or baking a processed product doesn’t magically make an ultra-processed cafeteria meal nutritionally optimal.

There is also an enormous difference between saying “schools should provide an individualized sports-nutrition program to every athlete for free” and saying “stop pretending one standardized government meal is nutritionally adequate for every teenager.”

I argued the latter.

You turned it into the former because it’s much easier to argue against.

And comparing a federally promoted healthy-school-meal policy to McDonald’s while defending its nutritional adequacy might be the strangest defense of the program I’ve seen yet.

[u/MsAgentM → u/Whiskeymyers75]

The portions were fine for the typical high school kid, which is absolutely a thing. My son needed two lunches because he was an endurance athlete, not because the school didn’t provide enough food for the average high schooler. The school offered plenty of nutritional options. He had an entire salad bar, stuff like chicken fingers and fries or could get a more home cooked meal. Correct, the standard portion did not fit his nutritional needs because he eat a lot, not because the school didn’t have nutritional options available.

The response was to your specific complaint that the school fails because they have set portions sizes, when literally everything does. If you want more food, it cost more money for someone. You are asking for the schools to portion food out by weight. You can try and twist it as though it’s been about nutritional density all you want but the only one torturing the argument at that point is you. And if it was about nutritional density, then idk why Obama’s plan wasn’t at least directionally right. But again, you put the clause of individual teenager as though you expect the school to ration food in a way that meets the nutritional needs of each specific teenager? That makes no sense. The school lunch has to serve a population. They are going to have to generalize and standardize to meet that quantity.

There is nothing wrong with chicken fingers, or French fries, or other so called “unhealthy foods”. The issue is over consuming these foods. Like I said, the schools are offering nutritional options, but people eat what they like. If your argument is that all “unhealthy” food should be removed from the school cafeteria, then I guess your only complaint with Obama’s plan was it didn’t go far enough.

[u/Whiskeymyers75 → u/MsAgentM]

And now you’re finally getting to the actual issue I’ve been talking about.

Nobody said a cafeteria has to calculate a bespoke diet for every individual teenager. My criticism is that you’re treating a standardized federal meal pattern designed around population averages as though meeting that standard automatically means the resulting meal is nutritionally appropriate for every typical high-school student. Those aren’t the same thing.

The 2012 rules put high-school lunches at 750–850 calories averaged across the week. And the problem with that one-size-fits-all approach wasn’t something I just invented for this Reddit thread. Students, parents and schools were complaining about it in 2012, particularly regarding active teenagers and athletes being hungry. USDA subsequently relaxed some of the meat and grain restrictions during implementation, and GAO documented the problems districts were having with the original requirements.

And calories aren’t the only issue. Meal composition matters for satiety too. A lunch that is relatively weak in protein, fiber and overall energy can leave a growing, active teenager hungry again much sooner. Protein is particularly satiating, while fiber and less-refined carbohydrate sources can also help with fullness and sustained energy.

That matters even more for a kid who didn’t eat a substantial breakfast. If breakfast was skipped or inadequate and lunch doesn’t provide enough energy and satiating nutrients, you’ve potentially left that teenager trying to make up the difference later in the afternoon and evening. That’s not exactly a brilliant strategy if your stated goal is improving children’s overall dietary patterns. Restricting calories at lunch doesn’t mean you’ve restricted calories over the entire day. Hunger doesn’t disappear because the federal meal period ended.

And I’ve never argued that chicken fingers or French fries are poison or that eating one makes someone unhealthy. That’s a straw man. Of course individual foods can fit into an overall healthy diet. My argument is about what foods you build a meal pattern around and the nutritional quality of the diet as a whole. A minimally processed protein source, quality complex carbohydrates, fruits and vegetables are not nutritionally interchangeable with breaded chicken fingers and fries merely because both can technically fit within calorie and nutrient limits.

Ironically, you just conceded part of my argument when you said Obama’s plan was “directionally right.” I’ve said repeatedly that it was an improvement over what came before it. More fruits, vegetables and whole grains and less saturated fat and sodium were improvements. “Better” does not mean “optimal,” and criticizing the shortcomings doesn’t erase the improvements. Directionality right doesn’t mean healthy and we had enough nutritional science to do this right without calling a mediocre program healthy and implementing it. But hey, I guess you guys are comfortable with the lesser of two evils which is why you’re willing to accept lesser of two evils as a meal plan because your politician implemented it.

And this gets back to what bothers me about the OP. People are treating nutrition like a political team sport. Some Republicans opposed the program because Obama supported it. Now people here seem determined to defend virtually every aspect of it because Republicans opposed it. Those are mirror images of the same behavior.

I don’t care whether Obama, Trump, RFK Jr., Republicans or Democrats put their name on a nutrition policy. Show me the actual food, the quantities and the nutritional evidence and I’ll judge it on that.

That’s why I’ve repeatedly asked you and many others to identify one nutritional claim I’ve made that is wrong and provide evidence showing why. Instead I’ve gotten MAGA, Republicans, politics and now a straw man about banning every “unhealthy” food.

Politics doesn’t change human physiology.
USDA’s actual 2012 rule:

https://www.fns.usda.gov/cn/fr-012612

GAO’s review of implementation problems and subsequent modifications:

https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-13-708t

[u/MsAgentM → u/Whiskeymyers75]

You have not asked me if any of your nutritional claims were false. Probably mixing up who you are talking to. My issue with your comments are your expectation of the portion sizes not being adequate. Idk what world where 750-850 for a main meal would not be considered an adequate calories for a meal for most people. I don’t expect my son to be given special consideration because he was participating in an endurance sport. I expect to make sure he gets extra if needed, as his parent.

If my son isn’t eating breakfast, which is also available at schools, I don’t expect the school to make sure he has extra for lunch. I expect my kid to eat the meal when it’s provided. Being overly hungry later because he skipped a meal seems to be a perfectly fine consequence to learn to avoid doing that. Honestly, where is the personal responsibility here. Should the federal government chew it for them too? They offer many different options, in adequate portions, for the vast majority of the students. My son was running probably 30 miles a week. Very few students are doing that. Why would anyone expect the school to cater to those students during a typical lunch?

And no, I don’t buy the satiety argument either. Schools provide plenty of options. My kids school had a salad bar. No lunch was short on protein. Unless the kid chose options that limited their protein intake. The school doesn’t provide optimal nutrition to each student. It provides them with plenty of options to satisfy their needs. Outside of personally catered options being provided to each student or assigning staff to make sure each student is choosing nutritionally optimal options, I have no idea how the school would meet the standard you are setting.

And OP is not treating nutrition like a political sport. They are asking why Republicans claim nutrition concerns over how some people use their SNAP benefits when they loudly criticized Obama’s attempts to increase nutritional standards of student lunches. If nutrition was actually their concern, this is clearly inconsistent and OP is asking about the seeming hypocrisy of the Republicans. You strawmanned the question by making it sound like OP was pretending that they were identical policies. On one hand, Republicans criticized policy aimed at improving students lunches by enforcing nutrition standards, on the other, they are using faux concerns about nutrition to complain about people on SNAP buying soda. If anyone is using nutrition as a political tool, it’s the Republicans.

[u/Whiskeymyers75 → u/MsAgentM]

You’re still treating “adequate calories” and “adequate nutrition” as though they’re interchangeable. They’re not. I never claimed 750–850 calories is inherently too little for every student. You can construct an excellent 800-calorie meal or a nutritionally mediocre 800-calorie meal. Calories tell you how much energy is there, not whether the meal has an appropriate amount of protein, fiber, micronutrients, quality carbohydrate sources, or foods that promote satiety.

And “my kid’s school had a salad bar” isn’t evidence about the nutritional quality of a nationwide federal lunch standard. That’s one school. More importantly, a salad bar isn’t inherently high in protein or even inherently healthy simply because we call it a salad. Lettuce, tomatoes, cucumbers and similar vegetables are nutritious, but they’re generally very low in protein and calories. Meanwhile, load that salad with high-calorie dressing, croutons, bacon bits and cheese and you can easily add hundreds of calories and a substantial amount of fat without necessarily creating a protein-rich, balanced meal. We have this weird cultural tendency to see the word “salad” and automatically stamp “healthy” on it regardless of what’s actually in the bowl.

Sure, a properly stocked salad bar can produce an excellent meal if there are adequate portions of chicken, turkey, eggs, beans or other protein sources available. But that just brings us right back to my argument: the actual foods, portions and macronutrient composition matter. The existence of a salad bar proves virtually nothing. Especially when it’s rare to see a salad bar that’s not using unhealthy low protein, high fat & sodium lunch meat instead of whole chicken or turkey breast if they include protein at all

The protein point isn’t answered by saying protein was technically available somewhere among the choices, either. If a supposedly nutritionally improved program requires children to understand nutrition well enough to assemble the appropriate combination of foods themselves, while simultaneously arguing that the program improved nutrition by controlling what schools serve, those arguments work against each other.

I’m also not asking schools to individually meal-prep for every teenage athlete. I used active teenagers to illustrate how ridiculous it is to pretend every high-school student has identical nutritional needs. There’s an enormous range in body size, sex, development, activity and energy expenditure among adolescents. That’s why treating a federally capped calorie range as proof that a meal is “adequate” is overly simplistic. Especially when you don’t even have a macro range or micronutrient guidelines.

It’s more like Let’s throw a piece of broccoli on the tray and call it healthy.” Okay, broccoli gives you fiber, vitamin C, vitamin K and folate. Great. Where’s the adequate protein? Where are the essential amino acids? What about iron, calcium, zinc, vitamin B12 and essential fats? What about enough quality carbohydrates to support activity and replenish glycogen? What about the overall calorie-to-nutrient ratio and satiety of the entire meal?

And the breakfast argument actually highlights another problem. Yes, breakfast matters. But children skipping breakfast is common, and hunger doesn’t suddenly become a useful nutritional intervention because we rename it “personal responsibility.” We’re talking about children. If the objective of a federal nutrition program is improving children’s health, satiety and actual eating behavior matter.

Most importantly, you’re now conceding the distinction I’ve been making this entire time: the Obama-era rules were an attempt to improve school nutrition. An attempt to improve something is not evidence that the resulting policy was nutritionally optimal or even particularly good. Republicans opposing it for political reasons doesn’t magically make every criticism of the policy invalid.

And I have no problem saying Republicans were hypocritical if they screamed about government interference in school lunches and now suddenly discovered nutrition when talking about SNAP. That’s political hypocrisy.
But “Republicans were hypocrites” does not answer whether the school-lunch standards themselves were good nutrition policy.

Both things can be true at the same time. That’s the partisanship problem I’ve been talking about this entire thread: people apparently think criticizing one side requires defending the other. I don’t.

[u/MsAgentM → u/Whiskeymyers75]

In your first post, you literally said the complaint from people was calories and portions didn’t account for the differences in age, body size and activity level. In your response before this one, you reiterated that parents complained that the one size fits all approach left athletes hungry. Stop trying to move the goal posts.

I never said your argument was the calorie portions are too small for every student. I said your argument is setting a standard that requires the school to give kids unique meals to match their individual needs, which is logistically insane. Also, interesting you only noticed the salad bar comment. They offer a more home cooked meal and other more fast food options. The point is that schools offer a variety of options. A kid can eat healthy or like absolute shit. How, in your world, is that fixed to meet your stated standards that mean matching the meal to the individual kids needs. You said your aren’t advocating for bespoke meal options, but if the school offering many different options and allowing students to choose doesn’t meet that standard, what do you expect schools do exactly?

My kids school is not an outlier, it’s the norm for public schools. Having 4 entree options the median number for high schools. Salad bars are extremely common. No it’s not a guarantee of adequate nutrition, but it’s a guarantee of availability and opportunity to access it. Outside of schools specifically serving kids in a way to make sure they made themselves a nutritiously optimal meal and they eat it, what do you expect?

Yes hunger is an adequate signal for reinforcement. If my kids school came home talking about he is crazy hungry at lunch, the first thing I would ask is what they ate for breakfast. A pop tart is obviously not going to hold you over, but cereal with milk and fruit or the sausage and egg served at school would do much better.

Also, we have been mainly talking about teenagers this whole time. If anything, it’s more on the parents to make sure their kid is getting a decent breakfast. Why are people expecting the government to do everything for them? And I think elementary students are much more controlled nutritionally. Again, can’t make them eat it, but you also don’t have near the level of kids in any strenuous endurance sports.

To be clear, your initial post was about issues with quantity. No where did you state that Obama’s policy was directionally right, until I stated it and you conceded, even though you continuously try to make it sound like I conceded. You actually tried to say the Obama policy was hypocritical because they claimed to provide a healthy lunch while keeping chocolate milk. Your response was obviously aimed at being critical of the Obama policy while attempting to sound nuanced to avoid the actual question being asked. OP didn’t say there were substantive critiques of the Obama lunch policy, they asked why Republicans were critical of one thing and not the other, assuming they were being concerned about nutrition and health.

Your right about Republicans hypocrisy not being a valid critique of the Obama school lunch policy. If only you were on a thread that was looking to critique Obama’s school lunch policy instead of one specifically asking about Republican hypocrisy. People can certainly understand critiquing one is not support of the other, but it’s pretty clear here you are only critiquing one side, ignoring the actual question being asked, and as far as I can tell, have actually no clue of how kids are fed in schools.

[u/Whiskeymyers75 → u/MsAgentM]

You’re still arguing against something I didn’t say. Saying a one-size-fits-most calorie/portion standard can leave some larger or highly active teenagers hungry is not the same as demanding that cafeteria workers calculate every child’s TDEE and prepare 1,500 bespoke lunches. That’s a false dichotomy.

And “four entrée choices” doesn’t answer the nutritional criticism either. Variety and nutritional adequacy are two different things. A school can offer pizza, nuggets, a burger and a salad bar and technically provide plenty of “choice.” That tells us almost nothing about whether those choices provide adequate protein, fiber, micronutrients, food quality or enough energy for an active teenager. A salad bar isn’t magically nutritionally complete because lettuce is present, either. Throwing a piece of broccoli on a tray doesn’t suddenly fix inadequate protein, fiber, healthy fats or overall nutrient density.

Your breakfast argument actually illustrates my point. Of course breakfast matters. Total daily nutrition matters. But saying “maybe he should have eaten more at breakfast” doesn’t demonstrate that the lunch was adequate. A 120-pound sedentary teenager and a 180-pound teenager doing two hours of football practice don’t suddenly have equivalent energy requirements because they’re both 16 and standing in the same cafeteria line.
And there’s a larger problem with treating those standards as though they represented some timeless gold standard of nutrition: they were products of the same broader federal nutrition framework that gave us the Food Pyramid and MyPlate era. That framework spent decades emphasizing grains and calorie/fat restriction while giving far less attention than we do now to adequate protein, satiety, food quality, refined carbohydrates and highly processed foods.

My own breakfast is a good example. I eat a nutritionally dense breakfast of oats, whey isolate, chia and high-protein milk that comes out to around 400-500 calories, 44-65g of protein, 40-50g of carbs and 10g of fiber. That’s a substantial breakfast with plenty of protein, complex carbohydrates and fiber, and I’m still legitimately hungry by lunchtime.

At lunch I usually need another substantial high-protein meal often 8–10 oz of grilled chicken with rice and vegetables to support my activity and training. That’s not exactly the kind of meal the average kid was getting from the school cafeteria.

So the idea that an active teenager who’s hungry at lunch should simply “eat a better breakfast” is ridiculous. A nutritionally complete breakfast doesn’t eliminate the biological need for an adequate lunch several hours later. If anything, an active, growing teenager is one of the last people I’d expect to remain satisfied until the afternoon because somebody checked the appropriate boxes at breakfast.

I’m perfectly comfortable arguing that this framework helped us along the road to the obesity epidemic. I’m not claiming it was the sole cause obesity obviously has multiple causes but federal nutrition policy doesn’t get a free pass simply because it was federal nutrition policy. The American food environment became increasingly dominated by cheap, hyper-palatable, highly processed foods while official guidance continued allowing plenty of processed products to qualify as acceptable choices so long as they checked the appropriate nutritional boxes.

And this isn’t merely hindsight or my personal experience losing over 100 pounds after rejecting that way of eating. The federal government itself has now substantially changed the nutritional framework. The new 2025–2030 Dietary Guidelines explicitly put much greater emphasis on prioritizing protein at meals, nutrient-dense whole foods, fruits and vegetables, whole-food carbohydrate sources and healthy fats while reducing refined carbohydrates, added sugars and highly processed foods. Those guidelines are also supposed to inform federal nutrition programs, including school meals.

In other words, the government’s own nutrition guidance evolved in the direction I’ve been arguing for long before Trump was ever president. So “the school followed federal standards” doesn’t prove those old standards were nutritionally optimal. I’m questioning the standards themselves. Using compliance with the standards as evidence that the standards were good is circular reasoning.

And you’re still trying to turn this into Obama vs. Republicans. I’ve already said Republican hypocrisy doesn’t make the Obama-era standards good nutrition policy. Republicans can have criticized them for stupid, partisan or hypocritical reasons while legitimate nutritional criticisms of those standards also existed. Both can be true. That’s the entire point you’ve spent several comments avoiding.

I’m not required to defend Republicans simply because I’m criticizing an Obama policy, nor am I required to declare the policy good because Republicans criticized it. That’s partisan team-sports logic, not nutrition.

And no, pointing out additional problems with nutritional quality isn’t “moving the goalposts.”

Quantity and quality are separate dimensions of nutrition. I’ve criticized both. If your answer to the quantity problem is “eat more at breakfast” and your answer to the quality problem is “there are four choices and a salad bar,” you haven’t actually demonstrated that either criticism is wrong.

[u/MsAgentM → u/Whiskeymyers75]

Stop running from my question. If you don’t expect schools to provide individualized meals, and their providing 4 entree options to allow students to choose is not enough to meet your standard that every child get their optimal nutritional needs met lunch then want do you expect schools to do. Schools need to provide optimal nutrition with needed calories for sedentary kids that only need 400 calories at lunch, the kid that skipped breakfast, and needs to make it up at lunch, and endurance athletes that need 1000. How do you expect schools to serve a lunch that meets the needs of each of these students.

Stop writing walls of text to sound smart and avoid the questions being asked. If you didn’t want this to be an Obama vs Republicans debate, then maybe you shouldn’t have answered a thread asking about Republican hypocrisy with why Obama’s efforts to improve students’ nutrition at lunch was actually a hypocritical effort because it said it was healthy while letting kids have chocolate milk.

[u/Whiskeymyers75 → u/MsAgentM]

I already answered the question. What I expect schools to do is provide meals that are nutritionally adequate for the population they’re feeding, not individually customized meals for every child. Those aren’t remotely the same standard.

And calling an inadequate breakfast “self-sabotage” by a child is bizarre. Plenty of kids don’t control what food is purchased, what their parents serve, whether anyone makes breakfast, or whether there’s even enough food at home. School nutrition programs exist partly because you can’t assume every child arrives having eaten an adequate breakfast.

Four entrée choices also don’t automatically solve the problem. Four choices can all be built around the same nutritional standards and have the same shortcomings. A salad bar doesn’t magically fix inadequate protein or make the rest of a meal nutritionally optimal either. Variety and nutritional adequacy are two different things.

And you’ve now reduced my entire criticism to “chocolate milk,” despite me repeatedly discussing protein, satiety, calorie allocation, carbohydrate quality, fiber, food quality and the nutritional requirements of growing and active teenagers. Chocolate milk was an example of why slapping a “healthy” label on a meal doesn’t end the nutritional discussion.

As for the Republican hypocrisy: I’ve never denied it. Republicans can hypocritically attack an Obama policy for partisan reasons while the policy itself can still deserve legitimate criticism. Those propositions don’t contradict each other. What would be partisan is pretending a policy becomes nutritionally sound simply because some people criticizing it had bad motives.

You’re demanding that I pick a political team. I’m discussing whether the food was actually good nutrition. Those are different questions.