NEW YORK – Michelle Obama defended school food restrictions she helped usher in as first lady during a Wednesday appearance on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, and took aim at those who would like to roll them back.

School officials, parents, students, nutritionists and others across the country have continuously criticized tighten nutritional standards in the National School Lunch Program Obama championed as first lady, citing declining revenues from unappetizing foods that have convinced well over a million students to stop eating lunch at school.

MORE NEWS: Know These Before Moving From Cyprus To The UK

But Obama told Fallon she has no plans to abandon her pet projects amid mounting pressure to repeal the rules once her family leaves the White House next week.

“I didn’t take these on because I was the first lady, I took them on because they meant something to me,” she said. “Our kids health, the fact that we have really made big strikes to change the health of our kids, especially through the school lunch program, which I hope does not get touched because that makes sense.

“So we have to keep doing things that make sense for our future,” she said. “It’s nuts, we know our kids need to eat well. They need to eat healthy and we can’t start changing that when they go to school.”

Obama’s comments follow a renewed push to eliminate or significantly change many of the federal regulations she convinced Congress to impose on schools through the National School Lunch Program. The changes included tightened restrictions on calories, fat, sugar, sodium, whole grains, fruits, vegetables, snack foods, beverages, vending machine sales and others.

The House Freedom Caucus published a “recommended list of regulations to remove” from the U.S. Department of Agriculture in December and urged President-elect Donald Trump to act on the suggestions within his first 100 days in office.

MORE NEWS: How to prepare for face-to-face classes

[xyz-ihs snippet=”NEW-In-Article-Rev-Content-Widget”]

“The rules are hallmarks of the Obama administration, but kids aren’t eating the foods, industries can’t comply with the standards, and schools are wasting money,” according to the document, First 100 Days: Rules, Regulations, and Executive Orders to Examine, Revoke, and Issue.

Students across the country have revolted against the first lady’s effort to fight childhood obesity through government bureaucracy with parody videos online, school lunch boycotts and pictures of their gruesome, unidentifiable lunches posted online with the hashtag #ThanksMichelleObama.

More than 1.2 million students have dropped out of the National School Lunch Program since the Michelle Obama-inspired regulations went into effect in 2012. School lunch waste has also increased by more than $1 billion because of regulations that require students to take a fruit or vegetable at lunch, whether they want it or not.

The massive increase in waste has forced some schools to come up with creative ways to get rid of the garbage, including feeding the lunch leftovers to pigs or other animals at local farms and school-run composting programs, EAGnews reports.

According to The Huffington Post:

It’s unclear whether the GOP-led Congress would support loosening school lunch standards, which have traditionally enjoyed bipartisan support. It’s also uncertain whether the conservative lawmakers want to gut the program’s nutritional standards or change them. 

The caucus wants a “rethinking” of the $12.7 billion lunch program and associated breakfast program, Ben Williamson, a spokesman for Rep. Mark Meadows (R-N.C.), the caucus chairman, said in an email. He cited a 2015 Congressional Budget Office report as evidence the program may “run the risk of becoming insolvent.”

“Under current law, the Congressional Budget Office projects, spending (on school meals) would rise to about $31 billion in nominal dollars by 2025. Adjusted for expected inflation, that value represents an increase of 26 percent over 2014 spending,” according to the report.

One person reportedly under consideration as Trump’s Secretary of Agriculture, Texas agriculture commissioner Sid Miller, is a vocal critic of the current National School Lunch Program and the Obama-inspired changes.

Miller told McClatchy he would gladly cut portions of the program if appointed to the position to cut down on the $2 billion in waste identified by the White House’s Office of Federal Budget and Management in 2015.

“We can probably save billions of dollars, and discussed that with (Trump’s) transition team,” he told the news service last week.