To be confused by healthy homemade flapjacks

[noblegiraffe]

I've read on here quite a few times on healthy lunchbox threads people talking about putting a homemade flapjack in their supposedly healthy offering.

DS starts school next week so I thought I'd give making them a go. Sugar, butter, golden syrup and a few porridge oats.

AIBU to be confused as to what is considered a healthy snack?

fapjack are on my dc's schools 'banned' foods list. next to cake and chrisps and muesli bars.

YANBU

I'd much prefer to have some carrot sticks or an apple and have some proper cake every so often. Flapjacks don't seem worth the calories to me! Even though I suppose they might be low gi? Anyway I think they're so overrated.

They're really not are they!

I make mines with honey, oats and butter

I make flapjack adapted from an MN recommended recipe:

3 bananas, chopped
Cup of pitted dates
75g butter (melted) OR 80ml vegetable oil
1tablespoon honey (optional)
2-3 cups oats

Whizz everything except the oats together in the blender. Mix in the oats and leave for about 5 minutes.

Press into greased cake tin and bake at 170 for about 25 minutes. Once cool cut into thin wedges.

DS (two and a half) LOVES them!

It's a complete lie about flapjack being healthy! Probably a conspiracy from the oat companies.

There are lots of ways to measure whether something is healthy or not, and flapjack could be both depending on which way you look at it.

Personally, I think a homemade flapjack, unless you use a recipe that goes crazy on the sugar and syrup, is a good thing overall for an active child to have in a school lunchbox.

You can improve them by replacing some of the oats with seeds, some of the butter with peanut butter and the golden syrup with agave syrup and the butter with coconut oil. IMO I would rather my DC ate something filling rather than nothing at all at lunchtime.

Oats are a superfood and therefore negate the ill effects of sugar, syrup and marge.

Cyclebump that sounds great. How long do they keep for - are they freezable? And by 'pitted dates' is that like the 'Eat Me' type jobs?

Ooh, peanut butter flapjacks sound nice. Does it just melt like normal butter?

You could put some seeds in there...and raisins.

And wine is made from grapes so counts towards your 5-a-day

...probably not best sent in your child's drink bottle to school though

It is healthy! I like being delusional!

I make the mums net recipe-with-condensed-milk so they stay soft and chewy like shop bought ones. I swap half the marg for rapeseed or rice bran oil; increase the proportion of oats to fat and sugar/syrup significantly (I think by at least a third) and add in dry-roasted sunflower and pumpkin seeds and some ground almonds to the mix.

I had it often in the early BF days when I had no sleep and was slightly delirious - I was told oats are good for milk production and to be honest, I figured homemade flapjack was significantly healthier than a pack of jaffa cakes. It is so dense you literally cannot eat more than a couple of bits of it before you get bored chewing and feel genuinely full up. Whereas jaffa cakes and choc chip cookies?well I can demolish them by the packet full with very little effort.

but yeah...it isn't really healthy. If you fed flap jacks to horses they would be crazy horses....

healthy ? What does that even mean anyway? There is room for all kinds in a healthy balanced diet, and homemade baked goods, without trans fats, preservatives or additives is a part of that healthy diet, in moderation.
There is far too much emphasis on the "healthiness" of individual items and not enough on the overall diet. Eat unprocessed, home-cooked, real food as much as possible, everything in balance. Thats healthy. A lot of the rest is just bullshit.

Careful with peanut butter flapjacks - some schools have a nut ban (for allergies.)

Don't forget PB is a bad idea for school lunch boxes though!

It depends a bit on what your particular child needs.

I have been thinking about making flapjack a regular addition for DD because it would be easy to sneak a lot of calcium in.

I've made a lot of carrot and courgette muffins (very low sugar) for veg dodging DS on similar grounds...

X-posted with YoToast re PB!

I think when people say they're healthy - they mean as an alternative to cake, not as an alternative to carrot sticks.

Healthier than crisps also.

It's the sugar that makes them unhealthy. Butter and oats are fine and super healthy, but flapjacks are crammed full of sugar which will have the same effect as a Mars Bar on the metabolism and energy levels of a child.

I dunno.

Flapjack. Carrot stick.

Hmmmm. Can't decide v

Even as an alternative to cake or biscuits they are not that healthy. I make them for when we need a concentrated calorie hit, eg for biking or walking days out.

I'm really hoping DS's school doesn't have a nut ban because he loves peanut butter sandwiches (and little else). I might make the peanut butter ones for breastfeeding purposes anyway :)