Gov. Ron DeSantis failed to answer a question from a “rising ninth grader” in South Carolina about school lunches and whether he supported Barack Obama’s “Let’s Move” program.
Instead, he reaffirmed “choices” to eat junk food, before denouncing the “food pyramid.”
The student was discussing “unhealthy” lunches at her school, including “canned oranges,” “pizza that was probably frozen” and Taki’s chips “with all this red food dye,” when DeSantis asked her what she ate for lunch before eventually affirming the right to serve nutritionally barren food in schools.
“What I don’t want to do though is have the federal government come and try to force you to make choices. I think you give people the information, let them know, you know what’s in store,” DeSantis said. “But I definitely think if you look at our society now compared to like 40 years ago, you know, it’s changed in terms of the health and the well-being we’ve actually had in the last five years, a pretty steep decline in life expectancy and that may not be necessarily related to diet as much.”
DeSantis soon enough pivoted off the topic of diet altogether, saying “some of it, unfortunately, is all these drug overdoses. So it’s, and maybe some other things that I know people are looking at. So, so we do need to do better on health, but I think we would do it in a way that would empower people to make those decisions.”
From there, the Governor pivoted to denouncing federal nutritional recommendations.
“I don’t want the federal government coming down, And honestly, the federal government in the past, remember they used to do the food pyramid. They said don’t eat, don’t eat fat, eat all the carbs. No, the carbs will make you fat too. And so they were wrong about that.”
The Governor changed the subject, saying that the “CDC, NIH, FDA need to be cleaned out” because “these agencies failed during, they lied to the American people about all these different issues.
“We need a reckoning on all of that because it hurt a lot of people and for the FDA to do an emergency approval of a COVID shot for a six-month-old baby, there was no basis to approve that,” DeSantis said.
An audience member noted that the rising ninth grader’s question went unanswered. DeSantis disagreed.
“No, I did. I said what we don’t want to do is we don’t want to be forcing changes to schools and dictating. So we will promote what would be good. Obviously, we want it to be cost-effective, but it’s going to be giving school districts, it’s going to be giving individual Americans the best information so that they can make appropriate choices,” DeSantis said. “It’s not going to be dictated by Washington.”
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