RALEIGH -- Proposed nutrition standards for day care centers were watered down in the state House on Monday night, after conservatives lambasted the effort as a big-government plot to ban chocolate milk.
Faced with building opposition, bill co-sponsor Rep. Jennifer Weiss introduced an amendment to change the nutrition mandates to suggestions. Still, some Republican members of the House assailed the proposal as "nanny-state" rules intended to remove from parents the discretion to feed their children as they see fit.
The state already sets nutrition standards for licensed child care facilities. The new bill seeks to tighten those existing requirements to meet the recommendations of a legislative task force on combating childhood obesity. Many of the recommendations, such as substituting reduced fat milk for whole milk for children older than 2, came from the American Academy of Pediatrics.
After conservative lawmakers pointed out that their mothers gave them whole milk and that they turned out just fine, Weiss recounted that people followed a lot of health advice decades ago that would now be considered ridiculous.
"Back then they said it was fine to smoke and have a martini when you are pregnant," said Weiss, a Cary Democrat. "If [my mother] hadn't, I might be a lot smarter than I am."
Weiss' amendment to weaken her own bill was approved Monday, and the measure passed its third vote in the House 67-46. The bill now goes to the state Senate.
After the bill passed its second vote Thursday, conservative activists worked to make the proposed nutrition requirements into a campaign issue.
In an e-mail blast and automated phone calls sent out Monday, Americans For Prosperity derided the bill as an effort to make state regulators the "milk police."
The robo calls were targeted at the home districts of House Democrats who voted for the bill last week, especially those who live in conservative-leaning parts of the state.
"Do you think the government should decide what children can be fed in day care?" asks a female voice in the version of the call made to voters in the district of a Sanford Democrat. "Your state Representative Jimmy Love thinks so. Jimmy Love voted on Thursday to put government bureaucrats in charge of what we can feed our children in day care."
The calls come a week after a similar effort by the group successfully torpedoed a public campaign financing provision in an ethics bill under consideration in the state Senate. The proposal was stripped from the bill after a recording by Pat McCrory, the former Charlotte mayor and 2008 Republican candidate for governor, portrayed it as an effort by Democrats to impose a tax increase on small businesses in the midst of a recession.
