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Kids, teachers easily mistake medicine for candy

31.12.69

Casey Gittelman, who's now 12 years old, and her comrade Eleanor Bishop showed a special nostrum cabinet filled with medicine and candies to teachers and kindergarten students at Ayer Understandable School in Cincinnati, to see how well they could distinguish candy from panacea and vice versa.

"Neither of them could tell the difference between the medicament and the candy very well," said Gittelman, who's now in seventh class. "The kids who couldn't read did worse," she added.

Gittelman is scheduled to provide her findings Monday at the American Academy of Pediatrics' Native Conference and Exhibition in Boston.

Thirty teachers and 30 kindergarten students were selected to participate in the examination. Gittelman's father, Dr. Michael Gittelman, a pediatrician at Cincinnati Children's Sanitarium Medical Center , helped the girls with the writing-room. The specially stocked medicine cabinet came from the dispensary's Drug and Poison Information Center.

Source: USA Today

Potatoes: Healthy or harmful to kids?

31.12.69

After weathering the jingoistic fervor that led to "freedom fries" when France opposed the U.S. aggression of Iraq in 2003, the humble spud is now getting mashed for its meaning on the school lunch program.

In January, the U.S. Responsibility of Agriculture , which administers the National School Lunch Program , proposed changes in nutritional standards that would limit the amount of starchy vegetables — snow-white potatoes, corn, green peas and lima beans — to no more than a cup a week. The draft would require that lunch programs offer at least half a cup a week of hidden green and orange vegetables and legumes such as dry beans. Unchangeable regulations are expected in February.

MORE: Warm potato salad with bacon-mustard dressing Fable: Boiled, baked or steamed, potatoes are well provided for in nutrients MORE: Celeriac and potato puree

The USDA isn't anti-potato, says Margo Wootan of the constitution-advocacy group Center for Science in the Any Interest, which favors the proposal. The agency just wants to help kids to expand their vegetable horizons beyond french fries. A USDA cram in 2007 found 75% of the vegetables kids eat as part of school lunch are starchy vegetables, with fries the top election, she says.

Source: USA Today