aibu to think school shouldnt serve unhealthy pudding every day!

[anothervisittothepark]

Just been looking at menu. My ds starts school lunches next week.
Every day has a sweet pudding. Like cupcake. Or choc sponge and custard. Theyalways have fruit and yogurt too. But i can guarantee ds will take cake every time given the option! You would think they would have a couple of days with only healthy puddings?
My ds doesnt have a very good stop button. And while he is not overweight i do have to often say no to him and insist he has fruit etc. I cant see it a very good thing giving them cake every day!

This also put me off several nurseries. None of us needs pudding every day, and it's nothing to do with being fat or thin. It's about looking after our teeth and all the actually nutritious stuff we could be eating instead.

As a PP said, now and then my DD gets pudding or some cake in a cafe, and we don't make a big deal about it. No point in eating a bland messed about version or in feeling guilty about it.

Yanbu

It's to get the calorie content up because they serve so little protein.

School dinners are white carb heavy and are really sending out bad messages re healthy meals.

The lack of fruit and veg worries me as much as the abundance of white carbs - a show fruit bowl kids never choose because the other choice is a stodgy pudding does not make a meal containing a spoonful of veg healthy.

What is school dinners without jam rolly polly and treacle pudding? I know what you mean but tbh I hate packed lunches for my dd so shes having dinners.
At our school we get a menu sent home and I choose the options and sometimes I choose the healthtvdesert but I make sure she has the " unhealthy" treats too.
Dd loves fruit AND junk. Shes a normal kid and shes far from obese despite eating like a gannet adms she does so much sport.

We get no choice what our dc get.

School dinners have been a great education in healthy eating for my dc.They now thing pizza,chips,cake and a spoonful if veg is a healthy meal.They actually think a single spoonful of veg makes a meal healthy regardless of what is in it.Mac cheese,cookie and milkshake is healthy because it has a single serving of sweetcorn in the side.School serves it.

Meanwhile in KS 2 and 3 many kids who are over fsm go hungry.

Utter madness.

I'm in secondary and I am so glad the school has bought in cashless catering. This means the children who's parents are expecting them to have school dinners actually will rather than spending there money at the corner shop on energy drinks and chocolate! As for the op yanbu, however like pp have said the cakes might not be that nice as are no/low sugar

Yesterday my dd had fish pie for dinners followed by a custard type thing. She was very enthusiastic about the custard! I made some proper custard when we got home but I think she prefers it from a packet :-(

I love school dinners and happily pay for them. The menu is varied and there are lots of fruit and veg available, which the DC actually eat.

As an example, Ds has pizza with broccoli and cauliflower. He sometimes has it with mash, which is carbtastic but not the end of the world. For pudding he has veg sticks and cheese and crackers. A variation of roast dinner and traditional pud is available twice a week and ds loves that.

If he has sandwiches, I put in a biscuit or similar in. I've made a rod for my own back with regards to a meal including a sweet at the end. He gas four meals at school (Mon - Thur) and only one at home. I feel entirely responsible for his diet.

He runs around playing for most of the lunch break. He gets a variety of foods that we don't have at home.

Cake and custard variation each day is fine by me. The portions are tiny.

The school pudding are far from sugar free. Once a week is fine but daily is a bad habit to get into. Sugar has a huge negative impact on the body

Our school meals are crap. Very low in quality protein (expensive), high in nutritionally void rubbish white wheat. In fact almost every thing is made from nutritionally void white wheat.

School dinners were horrendous in the 70's/80's. We are now facing a huge obesity problem and diabetes takes a massive amount out of the NHS budget.

Maybe it's just my body but I always had school dinners (chips!) and puddings. I've eaten choc / pudding more than once a day for 40yrs and I'm thin with no fillings.

I'm very active, eat poncy stuff like kale, gluten free, organic meat and veg the rest of the day. Never touch a diet food and I won't let the dc's touch them either. But I'll have choc by 10am, again in the afternoon and again after supper.

Too much fruit is just as bad for your teeth as cake. One of my vegan friends was obese and the NHS dietician said it was the excess fruit, obviously an extreme case, but it's not perfect either.

I really don't think school dinners are the bogeyman here.

YANBU (they're your kids, after all) but I don't really see a problem with this. My family has a sweet tooth so we always had pudding (although this included yoghurts and fruit salad). We're all thin, long-lived and healthy. My daughter gets pudding at nursery and is allowed it at home, sometimes healthy, sometimes not. I'd rather she eats sweet things at meal times rather than snack on crap all day.

I'm a lot more bothered about the amount of snacks she gets at nursery. Kids do not need to graze all day IMO.

Meglet ever heard of visceral fat? Thin people can be internally fat

Ps. I think everyone knows that certain fruits are more sugary then others. Yes it's best not to have too much fruit but obviously an apple with natural fruit sugars is going to be better then a cheap nutritionally void white wheat, fat and sugar filled biscuit.

It is possible to be thin and unhealthy.

Yes, I have. But I'm very active, walk several miles on the school and work run, go to the gym and run. Cholestral (sp?) and blood pressure are low so I will hopefully be ok . I don't drink, smoke, eat takeaways and red meat, or have sex (LP) so I need some pleasure in life .

YANBU, there is absolutely no need for something sweet at the end of each meal, and certainly not cheap cake / custard etc.

The school lunches menu at DS's school is much more refined sugar-heavy than packed lunches are allowed to be.

I intend to bring all of this up with DS's school. Repeatedly . And hopefully that's what other people will do too.

Surely the pudding is because there have to be sufficient calories in school meals and cake is much cheaper than protein? This also explains the daft combination of potatoes and bread or pasta and chips, which we would not serve at home.
These meals are not healthy, just filling stodge and there's nothing to stop children never touching a vegetable at school.

Of course fruit has carbs, but it also has fibre, vitamins, water and texture.

Stodgy puddings have refined flour (so little fibre), refined sugar (or some horrible sweetener), cooked fruit (so partially broken down and fewer vitamins), and whatever fat/fat substitute they can get away with. And they are gloopy pap. No amount of labelling the menus with the meaningless puff-word 'homemade' will convince me they don't use processed mixes for a lot of these puddings either, so you can probably add in a load of E numbers too.

If you're going to have a sweet course it's better to eat fresh fruit, for no other reason than it is hard to eat too much and consume too many calories. Gloopy puddings just slip down and it's easy to eat loads. After a couple of apples, however, you just don't fancy eating any more apples..