Alliance of White Anti-Racists Everywhere – Los Angeles
healthdisparities
Equal Access to HIV Treatment Could Finally Slow the Black Epidemic
08 months ago
A version of this article originally appeared in the Black AIDS Institute’s Black AIDS Weekly e-mail. Colorlines joins other black community media in co-publishing content from the Black AIDS Weekly.
Last week the AIDS world received the stunningly encouraging results of an advanced-stage clinical trial known as “HPTN 052.” It confirmed what many public health experts have long believed: early HIV treatment not only benefits the person infected, but also reduces the likelihood that he or she will transmit the virus to sexual partners. The news is an incredibly promising development for an epidemic that will mark its 30th annivesary next month and that has particularly ravaged black neighborhoods in the U.S., as well as countries throughout the Global South.
The HPTN 052 trial results grabbed headlines that HIV rarely gets these days in mainstream media, from the New York Times to the Wall Street Journal. The findings offered rare scientific clarity on preventing the virus’ spread: early treatment reduced HIV transmission by 96 percent. Termed “treatment as prevention,” the idea adds to the rapidly expanding range of prevention and treatment options that, used in concert, many believe could help finally break the back of the worldwide HIV/AIDS epidemic.
Black people represent only 13 percent of the U.S. population but account for 45 percent of new HIV infections, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. African Americans are eight times more likely to be diagnosed with HIV than whites and experience the highest rate of both AIDS diagnoses and AIDS deaths. They also suffer far more HIV-related health disparities than the population at large.
So might black Americans benefit disproportionately from the more aggressive antiretroviral therapy suggested by the HPTN 052?
“That is exactly what we have been talking about for some time,” said Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, in a telebriefing with reporters. “There is a great disparity in the African American community. This is a good scientific reason why we should [pursue treatment as prevention].”
Compared with the rest of the world, U.S. doctors often initiate antiretroviral treatment early in the life of a patient’s HIV infection–when an individual’s CD4 count, which is the measure of an immune system’s strength, falls below 500 per cubic millimeter. That’s a higher threshold than the World Health Organization’s international guidelines suggest.
But large numbers of black people are not diagnosed as HIV positive until after they’ve been HIV positive for many years. African Americans make up some 56 percent of all so-called late testers–people who are diagnosed with AIDS within one year of their HIV diagnosis. Not only do late testers have less chance to benefit from lifesaving treatment, they are also “considered extremely infectious, because they typically have massive amounts of the virus” in their bodies, the Wall Street Journal notes. The sooner the person is treated after diagnosis, the less likely he or she is to infect others.
The HPTN 052 trail results reinforce a point that the CDC and prevention advocates have stressed for the black epidemic in recent years: Aggressive testing is key to neutralizing both HIV’s spread and some of the HIV-related health disparities that black people experience. “Get out there, find out who is infected with voluntary testing, and link them to care and therapy as soon as possible,” Fauci declared.
Treatment Access Becomes Crucial
The HPTN 052 results become the latest HIV-prevention technology to make headlines in recent months–from the landmark microbicide research announced at the 2010 International AIDS Conference to the recent data on the potential of pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) to help protect gay and bisexual men. Several key advances toward discovering a preventive HIV vaccine have also occurred in recent weeks.
“The prevention toolbox has just exploded,” says Phill Wilson, president and CEO of the Black AIDS Institute. “This study definitively ends the debate of prevention versus treatment. Prevention and treatment are inextricably connected: Treatment is prevention.”
“These data must serve as a clarion call to funders, policy makers, civil society and implementers,” Mitchell Warren, executive director of New York City-based AVAC, formerly known as the AIDS Vaccine Advocacy Coalition, said in a statement. “If deployed effectively, efficiently and ethically, early initiation of treatment will be fundamental to turning the tide of the epidemic.”
Bambi W. Gaddist, founder and executive director of the South Carolina HIV/AIDS Council, which serves a largely African American and low-income client base, endorses the HPTN 052 findings–with a proviso. “I am elated that the NIAID study officially confirms what we already knew,” says Gaddist. The findings will serve as the “premise for our position as HIV/AIDS activists when we interface with congressional and state leadership who fail to support ADAP,” she adds.
ADAP, or the AIDS Drug Assistance Program, is the federal-state partnership that helps low-income people living with HIV/AIDS pay for their expensive, lifesaving medications. Recently a number of states have slashed funding for ADAP, in which participants are disproportionately black.
But testing and treatment are only one part of the equation. “The discussion of disclosure will become a greater imperative in light of these supportive findings,” says Dr. Gaddist, who worries that the HPTN 052 results could lead some to develop a false sense of security.
“These outcomes should accompany a national discussion of reducing HIV/AIDS stigma–so that the community will uphold the ideals of prevention,” Dr. Gaddist adds. “If we move to this mind-set, these medicines will not be needed in the first place.”
Wilson believes that the AIDS movement has reached “a deciding moment” in the pandemic’s 30-year history. “We have the tools to end the AIDS epidemic,” he says. “The question is whether we have the political will and compassion to make the investment necessary to use them.”
Rod McCullom, a writer and television news producer, blogs on black gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender news and pop culture at rod20.com.
More on Health Impact of Longterm Joblessness
01 year ago
Reader Barbara Glickstein adds a useful note to yesterday’s post from Yvonne Liu, who pointed out a growing body of research that shows how longterm joblessness impacts both physical and mental health. Barbara says she is a nurse and comments:
Talking with colleagues who care for those who come in for health services, not to mention the over 59 million without insurance or access to primary care, they are seeing increased depression, anxiety disorders and escalation of symptoms in those living with chronic conditions. The extension of benefits for the unemployed and a large-scale job creation program is both good for the pubic’s health and the health of the economy. Can you hear this Washington?
So it’s showing up in the field as well as the research. Adds another troubling layer to Naima Ramos-Champan’s report this morning on youth of color who are out of work. Their life trajectories are likely to widen a host of racial disparities we’ve spent years working to close. There’s the wealth gap Naima writes about. But there are also the longstanding disparities in deaths from preventable diseases that will likely worse if the trends Yvonne and Barbara cite continue.
The Physical and Emotional Costs of Long-Term Unemployment
01 year ago
CNN and the New York Times report new research that shows that long-term unemployment doesn’t just impact the jobless in the short-term, but has deep implications for the lifelong health and well-being of an individual as well as their children and families. One study by a sociologist at Albany, Kate W. Strully, found that people who lose their jobs are 83 percent more likely to develop stress-induced conditions, such as diabetes, arthritis, or depression.
Another paper by an economist at Columbia University, Till von Wachter, looked at mortality and income records of workers in Pennsylvania during the recession of the early 1980s. Wachter found that death rates increased astronomically for the unemployed in the year they lose their jobs, up to 100 percent. Mortality rates remained significantly higher for those that lose their jobs than for comparable workers who didn’t. In fact, the life expectancy of the unemployed is cut by a year to a year and a half.
The NY Times shared also stories of white steel workers who had heart attacks after being laid off from their jobs because the steel mill closed. We know that workers of color feel these health impacts doubly, on top of the existing trauma of structural racism.
Here’s what all of this adds up to: We need the White House and Congress to put aside partisan bickering and craft a large-scale job creation program that will put the millions of unemployed to work. The crisis has gone on long enough and spread wide enough that the costs of not doing so spread way past economics.
In the short-term, the lame-duck Congress will face a decision over whether to extend unemployment benefits. Typically, benefits last 26 weeks. The maximum time period was extended this past July, but will expire on Nov. 30 unless Congress passes legislation to continue relief. Yesterday, several advocacy groups sponsored a national call-in day to Congress to urge senators to continue unemployment benefits.
Unemployment insurance acts as a buffer, reducing the shock and strain on the jobless during economic hard times. It also stimulates spending in the economy, which can create jobs. The long-term unemployed have to spend their benefits immediately because they don’t have income or savings. That spending on food, rent and other basic needs translates into an infusion of cash into the economy and the creation of jobs. The Economic Policy Institute calculated that extending the unemployment insurance generated 1.7 million jobs in the first quarter of 2010. Were Congress to continue benefits through 2011, EPI estimates that over 700,000 jobs will be created.
Our people are hurting now, not only economically, but also in physical and emotional well-being. Extending benefits for the unemployed is the least our government can due for us, in our time of great need.
CDC Study Shows Teen Pregnancy About Education, Not Race
01 year ago
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports this week that teen pregnancy in the South is outpacing the rest of the country by a striking degree. The top 10 states for teen pregnancy rates in 2008 were in the South and Southwest, while the 10 lowest are clumped primarily in the Northeast.
Sexual health advocates have pointed out another geographic trend for this: the placement of comprehensive sex education programs in public schools vs. head-in-the-sand abstinence-only versions.
“The report demonstrates that the surest way to reduce teenage pregnancy is to provide young people with comprehensive, medically accurate sex education, and doing so is especially urgent for African Americans and Latino teens, who are getting pregnant more frequently than other young people,” said Planned Parenthood Federation of America education director Leslie Kantor (h/t The Hill)
That last bit is of course key. Pregnancy rates among black and Latina teens have long been much higher than the national rate, and this study repeats those findings. In 2007, the most recent year there’s race-specific data, Latina teens had birth rates three times that of whites while black teens had rates twice as high. So the geographic trend is at least in part driven by the fact that the South and Southwest have higher percentages of black and Latino residents.
But CDC stresses in the report that racial disparities don’t fully explain the regional disparities. In fact, across racial groups, teen pregnancy rates are lowest in the Northeast and West–places that tend to have comprehensive sex-ed programs. New York, New Jersey and California appear in the top 10 for lowest rates among all three racial groups. And white teens in the Southeast solidly lead the way for birth rates among whites nationally.
What’s this mean? That while black and Latina teens are most likely to get cheated by retrograde sexual education in public schools, it screws over everybody.
American Science’s Racist History Still Haunts the World
01 year ago
Early in America’s crusade to spread the wonders of modern medicine, a group of researchers in Guatemala did something unspeakable in the name of science. Documentation of the project is just now coming to light, more than 60 years later, and it reads like a horror novel: Hundreds of men systematically infected with syphilis and other sexually transmitted diseases in an effort, endorsed by both the U.S. and Guatemalan governments, to research the effectiveness of drug treatment.
Researchers exposed men to disease with varying degrees of intent. At first, Guatemalan health official Juan Funes selected prisoners in Guatemala City as subjects because prostitution at the penitentiary would likely yield fresh infections. But the researchers used more invasive tactics as well. The Washington Post reports, “in other cases, doctors put infectious material on the cervixes of uninfected prostitutes before they had sex with prisoners.” When they needed more infections, they took more aggressive measures–”direct inoculations made from syphilis bacteria poured into the men’s penises and on forearms and faces that were slightly abraded . . . or in a few cases through spinal punctures,” according to the research of the historian who broke the story, Susan M. Reverby (interviewed recently on Democracy Now!).
Many, but not all, of these people–who included prisoners, soldiers and mental patients–were given penicillin to test its effectiveness as an after-sex treatment of syphilis, a disease that that can result in blindness or death. Medical personnel carried out similar studies on gonorrhea, which can lead to intense pain and infertility, and chancroid, which causes genital ulcers.
The archival documents suggest the experiments didn’t raise significant ethical qualms in Washington. The surgeon general at the time was quoted as saying, “You know, we couldn’t do such an experiment in this country.”
Well, in a way, they could. A bizarre element in the story is the connection to another shameful chapter in the history of American medicine. The man behind the infection of incarcerated Guatemalans, Dr. John Cutler, had a hand in the infamous Tuskegee experiments as well.
That study (also conducted in the name of public health, of course) involved recruiting syphilitic black men into a 40-year program that denied them treatment without their knowledge. The U.S. Public Health Service worked in partnership with the Tuskegee Institute to rope hundreds of men into serving as an unwitting control group. Many were never told about their condition and received either insufficient treatment or none at all. Although the Public Health Service was administering penicillin for syphilis by 1943, the Tuskegee “subjects” received none to continue the controlled study. Modern day informed consent guidelines stem from the bioethical scandal that laid bare the cruel entanglement of racism and science.
The Guatemalan research is further proof that medical abuses against people of color wasn’t limited to Tuskegee. In Puerto Rico, for example, starting in the 1950s poor women served as “guinea pigs” for trials of high-dosage birth control pills, which were later embroiled in an ethical scandal over their potentially dangerous side effects. Exploiting Puerto Rican women’s wombs was seen as a convenient alternative to dealing with all the political and ethical hurdles that would have surrounded studies of the pill on the mainland.
Experimentation on marginalized groups, at home and abroad, is something of a tradition in American medicine. A Counterpunch article documents over a century of cases of the government deliberately sickening unwitting subjects, stretching from military detainees in the Philippines exposed to the plague to incarcerated men in Chicago infected with malaria.
Many of the researchers involved with these experiments may have genuinely believed they were serving a higher purpose. They might have thought the ends justified the means, that the lives of these Guatemalan inmates or poor black men were somehow being redeemed through their participation in the trials, albeit unwittingly. But both Tuskegee and Guatemala City reflect a deep, even subconscious belief among medical practitioners in the inferiority of the other.
The subjects, meanwhile, are tied together by their utter powerlessness under the coercion of medical authorities–poor, often imprisoned by the state, and lacking the knowledge they need to control their own bodies fully. One of the cruelest outcomes of these experiments is that they’ve irrevocably damaged public trust in medical science, which has undermined the exploited communities’ health on an even broader level. Some advocates attribute the black AIDS crisis in part to a broad alienation of the community from the health care system.
“We are concerned about the way in which this horrendous experiment, even though it was 60 years ago, may appear to people hearing about it today as indicative of research studies that are not conducted in an ethical fashion,” National Institutes of Health Director Francis S. Collins told the Post after the Guatemala story broke.
Collins is referring to yet another high-stakes consequence: Globally, the impacts of today’s most damaging diseases fall heaviest in poor communities of color, and any new treatment rightly demands clinical trials in those contexts. Scientists continue to struggle to earn enough trust to fill those trials, and the Guatemala history is one big reminder of why that’s so. For clinical trials currently operating in the Global South, the scandals of past experiments will hopefully serve as a lesson in ethics for the future.
Coal Pollution Will Kill 13K in 2010, Clustered in Cities, Says Study
01 year ago
A new report from the Clean Air Task Force reveals some dirty truths about the burden of coal industry pollution on American communities.
According to the study, fine particle pollution linked to the coal industry is “expected to cause over 13,000 premature deaths in 2010, as well as almost 10,000 hospitalizations and more than 20,000 heart attacks per year.” The estimated death toll clusters in certain industrial cities, namely New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, Pittsburgh and Washington, D.C., affirming other research showing the racial and economic implications of these urban health impacts.
But the silver lining is that the situation is evidently improving; compared to an earlier assessment, the grim figures represent “almost half the impact that our 2004 study found and is reflective of the impact that state and federal actions have had in reducing power plant emissions by roughly half.” In other words, the government plays an essential, role in addressing environmental health problem.
Other studies have suggested that racial divides are a key determinant in the health risks fueled by coal power. A 2002 report by a coalition of environmental and community groups described how power plants saddled Black communities with dirty air and toxics:
• The air in our communities violates air quality standards. In 2002, 71% of African Americans live in counties that violate federal air pollution standards, compared to 58% of the white population.
• Most African Americans live near a power plant. Sixty-eight percent of African Americans live within 30 miles of a coal-fired power plant — the distance within which the maximum effects of the smokestack plume are expected to occur. By comparison, about 56% of the white population live within 30 miles of a coal-fired power plant.
• We are likely to live near a power plant waste site. African Americans account for 17% of the people living within five miles of a power plant waste site.
• Asthma attacks send African Americans to the emergency room at three times the rate (174.3 visits per 10,000 population) of whites (59.4 visits per 10,000 population).
According to a research brief by Dr. Robert Bullard of Clark Atlanta University, “Blacks in 19 states and Latinos in 12 states are more than twice as likely as Whites to live in neighborhoods where air pollution poses the greatest health danger.”
Soot and smog are only part of the story. Health impacts are aggravated by various environmental and social factors like transit-related pollution, toxic contaminants lurking in urban housing, as well as overall poor health due to concentrated poverty. Moreover, coal power’s most dangerous byproduct, climate change, is tied to an escalation in heat-related deaths in inner cities, compounding the more localized pollution impacts. Coal-plant pollution is linked to corrosive effects on children’s cognitive development, which may shift even more of the burden in poor urban areas to impoverished mothers of color and eroding social service systems.
From a climate justice standpoint, recent research led by the University of Southern California’s Program for Environmental and Regional Equity points out that communities of color face disproportionate economic pain from volatile energy prices, while remaining alienated from the material “benefits” of the country’s ravenous energy consumption.
But the latest report stresses that this injustice can be at least partially remedied through human action–or worsened by inaction. As revealed by the strangulation of the climate-change discussion in Congress, the lack of a solution to dirty coal is more a matter of political will than ecological inevitability.
Another Way Neighborhoods Are Creating Real Food Options
01 year ago
Commenter Gordo offers a nice addition to Juell Stewart’s list of ways neighborhoods are taking control of their food systems: Mini-markets. Gordo points to a Minneapolis Public Radio article on that city’s effort,
The Streetwerks market is part of a growing movement to open small-scale farmers markets in low-income Minneapolis neighborhoods where fresh produce is scarce. Organizers say the markets are starting to transform the diets–and the economy–of some of the city’s poorest neighborhoods.
The effort got its start three years ago, after a local group struggled to open a small market outside a low-income housing complex. The group asked the Minneapolis City Council to reduce fees and paperwork for markets with five or fewer vendors. Council members agreed, and the “mini market” was born.
Since then, the number of markets has almost doubled each year. This summer, neighborhood groups are running 21 mini markets outside public housing high-rises, churches, and clinics. Most markets are open for two or three hours once or twice a week, often in the late afternoon when people are returning from work.
The article includes a nice interactive feature in which you can find recipes using seasonal, local produce from the mini-markets. Check it out Minnesotans.
5 Ways Neighborhoods Are Taking Control of Their Food Systems
01 year ago
Last week, the Senate unanimously passed the Healthy Hunger-Free Kids Act. The bill, which Michelle Obama pushed as part of her childhood obesity campaign, would provide $4.5 billion in additional funding to federal child nutrition programs over a period of 10 years–the first federal funding boost in 30 years. The bulk of the money would go toward improving the quality of school meals, making sure that students have fresh produce and can even start school gardens. It’s an important step in getting low-income children nutritional necessities.
We know that African-American, Latino and Native American children all have higher rates of obesity than their white counterparts, in large part because of how little access many communities of color have to healthy fruits and vegetables. As the first lady has stressed, fixing this doesn’t stop with government intervention. The food manufacturing and distribution industries will have to take responsibility for its role in creating this disparity as well.
But many food-deprived communities aren’t waiting around for that to happen; they’re taking steps to reclaim their food systems. Here are five ways they’re doing it.
Farmers Markets
“People need good food, but they need to be able to buy it,” says Travis Tench, who runs three weekly farmers’ markets in Bushwick, Brooklyn. Trench’s EcoStation:New York maintains a community garden that both provides food for the markets and teaches Bushwick residents how to grow and cook fresh produce. Make sure your farmers’ market accepts WIC/EBT so that everybody can access their goods. (Photo by Mario Tama/Getty Images)
Cooperative Food Buying
Want to work with your neighbors to save time and money when buying healthy food? A buying club is a good place to start. Members typically work together and divide duties to order and distribute food purchased in bulk. Buying clubs can fill the food gaps in communities with little access to healthy food, while maintaining low prices by eliminating the overhead charged by supermarkets. (Photo by Dolan Halbrook/CC)
Urban Farms
“All the major grocery stores left the city and we didn’t have anywhere to buy groceries,” says Nefer Ra Barber, co-chair and farm manager at the Detroit Black Food Security Network. Rather than relying on convenience stores to buy food, Barber and other Detroiters took matters into their own hands and started a two-acre urban farm. D-Town Farm partners with schools to teach healthy eating habits and agriculture to kids. (Photo by Chris Hondros/Getty Images)
Community Supported Agriculture
A CSA functions like a buying club, except you purchase “shares” of fresh fruits and vegetables from a local farmer. The farmer then delivers its harvest to your community and it’s distributed to members. Starting a CSA takes time–you must plan in the fall ahead of the growing season–but it’s rewarding. Many CSAs, like the one in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, make shares affordable with sliding-scale pricing. (Photo by thebittenword/CC)
Youth Leadership Development
Will Allen started Growing Power on his Milwaukee farm in 1993. Since then, it’s taught thousands of teens in Milwaukee and Chicago everything from growing cabbage to making compost. ”It’s been great to see children create a community in the garden,” says Laurell Sims in the Growing Power Chicago office. This summer, Growing Power started a 2.5-acre farm at a housing project on Chicago’s South Side. It will employ 40 teens and 150 adults. (Photo by Chris Hondros/Getty Images)
It’s Not Just Bullets Scarring Chicago Public Housing Residents
01 year ago
On Tuesday, 8-year-old Tanaja Stokes got caught in a storm of gunfire as she jumped rope outside on Chicago’s South Side. It was a typical crime story, but it was also an example of a sick kind of child mortality, one that doesn’t often come to mind when contemplating pool accidents, asthma attacks, and other “normal” childhood hazards.
As the recent California Endowment study on urban environment and health revealed, everyday violence falls on a continuum of trauma in the neighborhood environment, which could be seen as a collective epidemic.
And aside from bullets, there are many other ways life gets cut short in Chicago’s impoverished neighborhoods. This week, the Urban Institute posted a follow-up on a long-term study of former residents of the Madden/Wells housing complex in Chicago, which was shut down in 2008 as part of the Clinton-era Hope VI initiative. According to the latest round of health surveys, the community members, nearly all black women, who have been tracked since 2001, continue to struggle to move beyond an environment of poverty, even after being relocated. While the women of Madden/Wells had always suffered poor health overall, their problems gradually worsened to “stunning” levels in 2009.
In 2009, more than half (51 percent) of respondents identified their health as fair or poor, up from 37 percent in 2001. By comparison, just 13 percent of the general population reported fair or poor health; the figure for black women (who tend to be less healthy than average) is 20 percent.
Sorted by age group, younger people faced an especially wide health gap:
[R]espondents age 18 to 44 now rate their health as fair or poor more than six times as often as the national average for their own age group, and almost twice as often as the national average for people over 65.
Typical problems included stroke, obesity, hypertension and diabetes, as well as mental health problems like depression and anxiety. Many reported that they couldn’t stand on their feet for two straight hours. More than one in three residents said that “their physical health had interfered with their job or education in the previous year.”
Most resorted to a hospital or community clinic for medical care, deprived of a “medical home” with a regular doctor who could help them manage conditions like high blood pressure or asthma. The researchers couldn’t follow up with some of the respondents because they were dead. The mortality rate, 14 percent, was about twice that of the general population.
But there was one silver lining in the study: safety. After being moved into new public or private housing, residents reported that they generally felt much safer. The proportion who reported major problems with shootings and violence had dropped from nearly 70 percent to 12 percent since 2001. The better environment could influence mental health, too.
“I used to worry my ass off . . . in Madden/Wells about shooting,” said one mother in an interview. But these days, she continued, “I don’t worry and be all stressed out and you know, shaking all the time now. I’m relaxed. I’m calming down. I enjoy myself.”
Nonetheless, even their new safer neighborhoods, researchers said, residents were still troubled by violence, crime and economic hardship. And the fact that their health problems have persisted, even worsened, makes it clear that a rigid measure of safety does not mean these families are really safe from harm.
Maybe these women’s children face less risk of meeting the same fate as Tanaja Stokes did. But whether the problem is street violence or an environmental assault, years of collective suffering and trauma may leave families with scars that won’t ever heal.
Michelle Obama: Let’s Make Schools Feed Kids Real Food
01 year ago
Michelle Obama plugs the meat on the bones of her childhood obesity intiative in a Washington Post op-ed today. Obama’s “Let’s Move!” campaign started off by urging parents to make healthy choices for their kids, but she’s spent as much time drawing attention to the responsibilities of industry and government as she has the duties of parents. She’s been pushing food manufacturers to make real food and lobbying Congress to make schools feed students stuff that doesn’t kill them, through the Child Nutrition Bill. In today’s op-ed, after pointing out uniquely high obesity rates among kids of color, Obama writes,
But even if we all work to help our kids lead healthy lives at home, they also need to stay healthy and active at school.
[snip]
To start, the bill will make it easier for the tens of millions of children who participate in the National School Lunch Program and the School Breakfast Program — and many others who are eligible but not enrolled — to get the nutritious meals they need to do their best. It will set higher nutritional standards for school meals by requiring more fruits, vegetables and whole grains while reducing fat and salt. It will offer rewards to schools that meet those standards. And it will help eliminate junk food from vending machines and a la carte lines — a major step that is supported by parents, health-experts, and many in the food and beverage industry.
Read Obama’s whole op-ed here.