WASHINGTON, D.C. – First lady Michelle Obama’s campaign to address the nation’s youth obesity epidemic is actually making kids fatter, according to a new study.

Virginia Tech College of Agriculture and Life Sciences professor Wen You found that the longer kids eat government-funded school meals, the more likely they will be overweight, which means low-income kids the program seeks to help are the most at risk, Eurekalert.org reports.

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The study, published in the journal of Health Economics, also points out the most obvious problems with the federal school food regulations championed by Michelle Obama: government regulations don’t help students understand why it’s important to eat healthy, or make the unappetizing result of the regulations more bearable.

“While well-intentioned, these government funded school meal programs that are aimed at making kids healthy are in fact making participating students more at risk of being overweight,” You said.

“We found that the longer children were in the programs, the higher their risk of being overweight. We also saw the most negative effect of the government-funded school meal programs in the South, the Northeast, and rural areas of the country,” she said. “The question now is what to do in order to not just fill bellies, but make sure those children consume healthy and nutritious food — or at least not contribute to the obesity epidemic.”

The Daily Mail, which often features students’ objections to and social media pictures of disgusting school lunches, dubbed the study “a damning indictment of Michelle Obama’s years-long meal program,” and pointed to the study’s evidence showing “children are more likely to be overweight if they participate in both the school breakfast and lunch programs throughout their schooling years.”

You said that recent changes to the federal lunch program, specifically the Community Eligibility Program that grants free government food to entire schools or districts with a majority of low-income students, will likely only help fuel the country’s childhood obesity epidemic.

“It’s potentially troubling since the nutritional targets of previous standards were not being met satisfactorily prior to this new legislation, and now there are potentially millions more kids who could be affected by accessing free school meals,” she said, according to Eurkalert.

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The site reports:

You and her colleague Kristen Capogrossi, a former doctoral student at Virginia Tech and now an economist at RTI International, examined both long-term and short-term school meal programs participation effects and the specific short-term participation effect of those students whose families may have experienced intermittent poverty and switched participation status along the way.

They found that long-term participation posed the largest risk of being overweight. The study utilized a nationally representative longitudinal data of 21, 260 students who were followed from kindergarten to eighth grade and controlled for the self-selection and income effects to examine school meal programs’ influence on student’s body mass index z-score changes.

The study utilized statistical methods to match students who were eligible and chose not to participate in the school meal programs with students who chose to participate to ensure comparability. The team also examined a subgroup of students who changed their program participation status along the way and confirmed the short-term risk of being overweight imposed by the school lunch program.

The study, funded in part by the U.S. Department of Agriculture – the same agency responsible for the school nutrition standards, “uncovers the need to go beyond merely raising nutrition standards” to help schools “provide not just healthy food that meets standards, but also healthy food that will be acceptable and appetizing to children,” according to Eruekalert.

“This study also helps to identify the regions that are most in need and calls for targeted policy design,” You said.

The study follows years of complaints from students, parents, administrators, teachers and other school staff regarding school food regulations imposed on schools as part of Michelle Obama’s attempt to fight obesity through bureaucracy.

In the years strict limits on calories, fat, sugar, sodium, whole grains and fruits and vegetables were instituted through the Healthy and Hunger Free Kids Act of 2010, well over 1 million students have dropped out of the National School Lunch Program, including hundreds of schools.

The changes, which require students to take a fruit or vegetable whether they want it or not, has also contributed to an estimated $1 billion increase in annual school food waste.