Posted on 11/08/2014 3:05:27 AM PST by Bettyprob
Many parents prefer to send their children off to school with a packed lunch, believing that the food they have given them is far healthier than school lunches. But a new study, published in the Journal of Nutrition Education and Behavior, claims this may not be the case.
The research team, led by Alisha R. Farris of the Department of Human Nutrition, Food and Exercise at Virginia Tech, found that school lunches had better average nutritional quality than packed lunches.
"We found that both packed and school lunches almost entirely met nutrition standards, except school lunches were below energy and iron recommendations, whereas packed lunches exceeded fat and saturated fat recommendations," says Farris.
The quality of school lunches has been a major focus in recent years. In 2012, the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) updated the National School Lunch Program (NSLP) guidelines, setting out a number of recommendations with the aim of offering healthier food choices to children at school.
As part of the guidelines, the USDA recommend that schools should ensure students are offered fruits and vegetables every day, are offered fat-free or low-fat milk varieties, given a choice of whole-grain rich foods and are served the correct food portion size, based on their age.
It seems these recommendations have proved successful so far. In March, Medical News Today reported on a study from Harvard School of Public Health in Boston, MA, claiming that the guidelines have increased consumption of fruits and vegetables among low-income students.
(Excerpt) Read more at medicalnewstoday.com ...
This study is useless. It doesnt matter whether school or home prepared lunches have more nutrition, both are more than adequate. The kids aren’t at risk from malnutrition from either one. This isnt freaking Darfur.
Avocado Bingo!
Two issues here.
The first is informational. If the packed lunches are somehow nutritionally lacking, instead of just attacking them as inadequate, how about, as you suggest, providing printed guidelines to parents so that they can improve their content, control portion size, etc? Then get food manufacturers aboard with producing conveniently packaged, nutritional food items that meet the guidelines. It is not like they (the food manufacturers) won’t respond and quickly. Supermarkets are full of products designed for lunch boxes/bags (school and office) right now.
The second issue is more sinister and has to do with attacking any input from outside the school as uninformed, inadequate, and harmful. This is the left/liberal education agenda in action to isolate and indoctrinate students that only those things provided through approved government channels are useful. Packed lunches, no matter how nutritious, will, prima fascia, always be inadequate because they represent individual resistance to the educational system. They create difference when the objective is uniformity. Better all children be required to eat the same barely palatable school lunch than social dissonance be created when students see what their individual lunches contain and some dare to complain to their parents about it.
Our two younger kids ate school lunch. It was fried chicken nuggets, french fries, etc. All junk food. They were healthy and very thin, but it was still a terrible lunch. Our older son always took his lunch that I packed for him. He took a sandwich, milk, fruit, dessert, etc. It was a much healthier lunch. I bought top quality ingredients. They all grew up healthy, all in their 30s, but those school lunches were just plain junk food. Like sub-par McDonalds stuff. When I was in school grades 1-4 we had the best school lunches. The food was fantastic. So it CAN be done. That was in the 1950s.
These idiots never learned anything from the lesson of prohibition and the War on Drugs. If people want something, they can and will get it. There are kids literally having underground junk food dealing empires in schools.
AMEN AMEN AMEN!
There's another reason a packed lunch is healthier. A parent can coordinate the nutrional content in all three daily meals combined. They can plan for the time between meals. They can provide healthy food the child will actually enjoy.
And we NEED cholesterol!
The study that claimed cholesterol was bad for us, was done on vegetarian White Rabbits in a lab. They wake up in the middle of the night and eat their own poop.
So if you are not a rabbit, and you don’t eat your poop in the middle of the night, you need not worry about cholesterol.
Yep - fats and natural sugars fill the needs/desires of our natural appetites and foster healthier portions and states of existence. The "health food" movement has caused massive problems with obesity and diabetes, not to mention other maladies that have grown exponentially.
But fat and saturated fat have proven not to be the nutritional problems previously claimed,whereas energy and iron are both important.
I recall reading that during WW2 that Europe was starving for fat. Also, stone age hunters actively looked for the fatiest animals and not lean ones like rabbits (see “rabbit starvation”). A documentary about an African tribe I saw years ago showed the tribe members preferring the fattest animals.
The modern USDA food pyramid sceme guidelines are pig feed.
If the kids refuse to eat what the schools are serving, the nutritional value of uneaten food means nothing.
Food in the trash can have the highest nutritional value in the world, but if it is in the trash, what good will it ever do?
Forgot to add: What we need to do is mandate the eating of this food!/s
(well, not actually /s as many dems are probably dreaming up fascist laws to do so as we speak)
“A couple of PBJ sandwiches, an apple with a carton of whole milk seemed provide children with enough nutrition to make it though the day ..”
Um..no. Peanut allergies. Can’t have peanuts at school. Of course when we were kids, we never heard of a kid with a peanut allergy. Solution? Don’t eat peanuts and let my kid have his sandwich.
School lunches have an alternate purpose. It is designed to minimize the morning parent/child interaction off the table. Parent doesn’t make lunch for the kid, chances are the parent will get the kid dressed and out the door.
Which packed lunches, specifically?
When I was a kid my mother used to pack me chopped chicken liver sandwiches or schmaltz( rendered chicken fat) on bread. Believe it or not my cholesterol as a 60+ woman is perfect.
My grandkid,as a rule, bring their lunches to school. Their moms know what they like and don’t like. Occasionally they buy lunch when it’s something they enjoy which isn’t too often. They all have thermoses and often get leftovers from dinner reheated for lunch. My one grandson would be happy with a pint of cherry tomatoes and a jar of pickles for his lunch.
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