Plan adds fruit, vegetables to WIC

baltimoresun.com

When rich corporate interests start trying to tell the USDA how to feed low-income women and children, you have to know they're going to have the meat and dairy industries' interests at heart, not the poor. What's galling is that they try to hide their greed behind concern for the health of families utilizing the nutrition program:

The U.S. Department of Agriculture is weighing a proposal to add fruits, vegetables and whole grains to the food packages that are offered in the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children, known as WIC for short.

As logical as that might sound, the decision is hardly a given.

The WIC food packages include such items as infant formula, juice, milk, cheese, eggs and peanut butter. But previous attempts to revise the packages have hit a wall, in part because of opposition from powerful food lobbies that wanted to maintain the status quo.

Shirley Watkins, undersecretary of agriculture for food, nutrition and consumer services in the Clinton administration, said her attempts to add fruits and vegetables to the program were quickly quashed.

"There were a lot of companies that didn't want anything done to the food packages, but we had WIC recipients that really wanted change," Watkins said. "We had lobbyists coming in. We knew as we pushed forward, they were pushing in any direction to keep us from moving."

What is different this time is that the USDA sought additional ammunition - a study completed last spring by the quasi-governmental Institute of Medicine - that should make the changes more palatable. The institute recommended that WIC add more fruits and vegetables, and decrease the amount of milk and eggs.

What's interesting to me is that the USDA - which usually operates in the best interests of the meat and dairy industries - here has finally sought a means to combat the pressures of industry lobbyists with science. What a concept. Would that this was more common.

Currently, the WIC food packages offer fresh carrots for pregnant women. The Institute of Medicine proposed giving WIC recipients monthly vouchers - $8 for children, $10 for women - to buy fresh fruits or vegetables.

But because the institute's mandate was to make changes without adding costs, its proposal calls for reducing the amount of milk, juice and eggs.

Under the current program, young children receive WIC vouchers for about 9 ounces of vitamin C-rich juice and 3 cups of milk per day. If the changes are adopted, the children would get 4 ounces of vitamin C-rich juice and 2 cups of milk per day.

Their monthly allowance for eggs would also be reduced from up to 2 1/2 dozen to a dozen.

People should not be getting their nutrients from concentrated sources that fail to provide overall nutrition, while also contributing unhealthy foods to their diet. Juice is basically a sugary, fiberless way to get vitamin C into a diet, when kids and mothers should be eating more actual vitamin C-rich fruits and vegetables. Milk is basically a way to make calves grow really fast into cows, which means it's probably not a good source of protein and calcium for kids, when other sources (like legumes and vegetables) are much healthier and inexpensive. The plan doesn't exactly turn WIC participants into vegans, but it brings their diet much more in line with the government's current nutrition recommendations:

Suzanne Murphy, a professor at the Cancer Research Center of Hawaii and chairwoman of the Institute of Medicine WIC study, said current guidelines provide WIC participants with more dairy than federal nutrition guidelines recommend.

Fortunately, if the proposal goes through as written, this also means fewer eggs and milk sold by the industry. This, of course, is why they are pressing so hard not to get squeezed out, but it's exactly the sort of thing activists can fight to help reduce the demand for animal products, along with school lunch programs and the like.

Categories: WIC | nutrition recommendations | USDA