More Plant Based and Less Dairy Foods for American WIC National Nutrition Program

Neutral news, good news and bad news.

Neutral news:

"The US Department of Agriculture (USDA) said last week it is going to increase the amount of plant based (whole grains, vegetables, and fruit) foods and decrease the amount of dairy foods (milk, eggs, and cheese) in the country's Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children (WIC), following the recommendations of the Institute of Medicine and bringing it in line with current federal dietary guidelines."

This, of course, does nothing substantial. WICcans can still buy high fat dairy and other high fat, high Calorie products. (The IOM is worse than useless when it comes to nutrition, overweight and obesity.)

Good news:

"More than 8 million Americans receive services from the WIC every month, including 4 million children, 2 million infants, and nearly 2 million women."

At least some attempt is being made to control how our tax dollars are being spent.

It's about time.

"The new provision, the first major change since the inception of the WIC more than 30 years ago, must be in place across the board by August 2009, said the USDA."

And WIC is supposed to cover some fat people.

Bad news:

WIC still wrongly assumes overweight to be a "medically-based risk" and that "failure to meet the dietary guidelines" is a problem.

Too bad. More good could have come from this.