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OK, so they got rid of the cheesy pizzas and french fries and fried chicken.  But what about the chocolate cake? A new study has found that while school lunch programs have indeed dropped most of the fatty foods, they've done nothing about the sugar. philly.com reports, "The federal government caps the amount of fat and salt in breakfasts and lunches. It sets minimum standards for servings of fruit, vegetables, grains, milk and meat. But one widely used and often-overused product has no official limits: sugar." And here's a chilling thought: do the feds not focus on sugar because of its powerful lobbyists? According to the Web site, recent research shows that sugar levels in school meals are more than double what is recommended for the general public. "Elementary school lunch menus contain 115 percent of the recommended daily calories from added sugars and fats, according to a November study by the USDA’s Food and Nutrition Service." And mid...

Debit cards can make your kids fat.  Really.  It sounds ridiculous but a new study has shown that people, even kids, and alas I'm in here, too, make more frivolous choices when they use a debit card. To expedite long lunch lines and enable cleaner accounting, about 80 percent of schools use debit cards or accounts that parents can add money to for cafeteria lunch transactions, write David Just and Brian Wansink, co-directors of the Cornell Center for Behavioral Economics in Child Nutrition Programs, according to newswise.com. “There may be a reason for concern about the popularity of cashless systems,” the Website quotes researchers. “Debit cards have been shown to induce more frivolous purchases or greater overall spending.” Researchers compared purchases at school cafeterias that use debit-only systems with those that accept debit or cash. They found that students in first through 12th grades at debit/cash cafeterias consumed about 721 calories for lunch compared with...