Posted on 11/08/2014 9:02:17 AM PST by Oldeconomybuyer
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.
But despite drives to improve the quality of school lunches, around 40% of parents continue to prepare a packed lunch for their children. However, Farris notes that - unlike school lunches - there are no guidelines that recommend what foods parents should include in their children's packed lunches.
The team found that packed lunches contained a lot more energy, carbohydrates, fat, saturated fat and sugar than school lunches. They also contained much lower levels of protein, fiber, vitamin A and calcium.
The researchers say these findings are likely to be a result of the USDA guidelines promoting higher exposure to fruits and vegetables, while packed lunches were more likely to contain savory snacks, desserts and sugar-sweetened drinks.
Sodium content, however, was found to be much higher in school lunches that packed lunches, even though the team says packed lunches were more likely to contain processed foods. What is more, school lunches were found to contain lower levels of vitamin C and iron than packed lunches.
(Excerpt) Read more at medicalnewstoday.com ...
pssttt....lots of chat about this over hear...
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/3224779/posts
Uneaten food is not nutritional. If nutrition was all that mattered, we’d eat astronaut food and vitamin pills.
And they know what these kids are eating how?
Cut the entire government by 1/3.
I have no doubt that most parents could be feeding their children in a more healthy manner. But nothing is more unhealthy and deadly than government force. In the end we will all be a lot healthier if the government backs off.
What matters the most is who gets to decide which lunch the children eat.
I say the parents should.
Those who think it is the governments decision to make, for the safety of our children, they should be thrown off a high cliff into the sea.
B $
oops!
Since there is no single “packed lunch”, shouldn’t it read that packed lunches ‘sometimes’, or ‘can be’, or ‘frequently’, or ‘often ‘ are nutritionally inferior to?
I grew up eating a packed lunch, and yet I somehow managed to survive. Go figure.
Just a reminder that, when it comes to children, government knows best.
Fairly soon there will be trial balloon stories about how the government needs to inspect breakfast and dinner......for the children of course.
In high school, I would go to the school store and buy a pack of Starbursts. Pretty much every day, that was all I ate. Guess what, 25 years later- I am stll here. Still healthy. Still thin. Don’t have diabetes, etc.
Growing up my siblings and I had almost entirely packed lunches consisting of a tuna or peanut butter & jelly sandwich, carrot sticks, apple or orange and purchased milk.
One day my lunch got mixed up with that of our fattest classmate. Her lunch was a bologna sandwich, chips and cookies.
She looked in my lunch bag and scowled at it. So some parents obviously do a better job with lunches but the government has no business making up lunches according to Moochie’s standards.
Researchers say? They say anything these days. Depends on what the present administration wants said and how many grant dollars are involved.
You need to think like a pro-minimum wage liberal.
Cut the government by 75%.
Based on this, how did we survive? /ridicule /sarc
Cut the entire government by 1/3.
Not enough. Cut by 1/3 each year for 10 years.
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