To think that free breakfast at school is a bad idea due to the quality?

[Mushypeass]

Firstly, I fully agree with the principle of free breakfast for all pupils. My reservation comes from the quality of food that is often served up in UK school canteens. Obviously a poor quality breakfast is better than no breakfast at all but AIBU that it could encourage children to eat even more UPFs? For example, children who have may had a relatively healthy breakfast at home may now opt eat UPFs at school with their pals instead.

Seocondly, why is the food so poor in so many schools? How can other countries manage to provide their youth with nutritious and healthy meals but we can’t?

we should look to Japan on how to do it better

We shouldn’t have to feed kids in schools. Parents should be made responsible to feed their children. Surely appending every penny down the pub is neglect?

I agree with you. I’ve seen enough examples of soggy cornflakes and cheap white bread toast being offered up. Surely it would be both cheaper and healthier to have a huge vat of porridge with a range of fruit toppings. Easy.

I’ve worked for over 20 years researching and on the front lines of child poverty and you are wrong. Yes poverty is multi-factor, but the vast vast majority of parents love their kids and want to look after them properly. Why don’t you volunteer for a local charity serving the community you demonise and try to understand the appalling reality some people live in. What do you think is going to happen to a neglected and abused child when they have their own kids if there is no help or support to overcome childhood trauma?

But you used your kids skin and teeth as proof of your superiority which is rubbish. My kids went to school with a dentists son. He had fillings and his father told me it was a nightmare for him that his son had such poor dental enamel that whatever he did he couldn't keep his sons teeth healthy. If only he'd spoken to an expert like you.

The father was quite clearly delusional.
The cobblers usually do have the worst shoes.

Definitely this.

It isn't just high sugar diets and poor dental hygiene that cause dental issues. Other underlying health conditions that aren't diet related can have a massive impact on the heath and strength of your teeth.

Box of cereal is about 80p and milk is cheap too. Up until recently I was jobless and young (under 25s get a lot less benefits than over 25s look up the difference it's quite big) my kids always had breakfast what excuse do these older people have 🤔 dusty and neglectful losers and I don't know if breakfast club is even the solution because the people I know like this aren't getting their kids to school for lesson start time let alone even earlier for a breakfast club.

Oh it’s definitely neglectful and lazy. My parents never had money when I was growing up and were younger They always made sure I had food and was clean

I'm on the fence regarding "good" food.
I say that as a trained cordon bleu Cook and a person who has always eaten well from childhood to adulthood.

At primary, private, school lunches were great.

At grammar school state, 1971, typical school lunches were:

Beef cobbler with vegetables and mashed potato
Liver and bacon with vegetable and mashed potato
Egg salad, an egg and a bit of grated cheese accompanied by a lettuce leaf on which there was a slice of tomato, a slice of cucumber and half a dozen pieces of cress with mashed potato
A roast - meat of some description, roast potatoes, veg and gravy
Fish (grey) in slimy and thin parsley sauce, mash and peas

Puddings were - puddings, stodgy, jam covered, fruit crumbles, dead fly pie, etc with custard or ice cream.

Sounds great doesn't it but if I describe the beef cobbler for example: gristly, grey meat swimming in watery gravy with globules of fat and a bit of disintegrating swede or turnip, topped with rock hard orange scone, watery cabbage and mashed potato, lumpy with black eyes, you get the message. Other meals could be similarly described. There were occasional things that were OK, for example: cheese, egg and bacon pie but not often.

Custards were processed and often coloured brown or pink, ice-cream was the cheapest available, crumbles were welded.

It was more or less inedible and aged 11, 12, 13 I recall being so hungry in the afternoons, stinging still from the lectures about the starving in India.

Frankly, chips and nuggets would have at least been edible and would have filled me up for the afternoon. I don't think I ever saw a piece of freah fruit being available or a vegetable other than Carrots, cabbage and peas.

Thankfully at third form, due to pressure from parents, we were allowed to take a packed lunch and mealtimes improved. I had a flask of soup or hot chocolate, a cheese or ham sandwich and an apple or an orange packed by my mother.

If school food is to be good, then the budgets need to be adequate - it costs.

Regarding dental health, genetically my first teeth were not good, some people's aren't. Look at the late Queen Mother and she was hardly deprived. DD's baby teeth were shocking - she had to have four molars extracted, aged 4. Not due to diet but because I had pleurisy at about 18 weeks pregnant and had to have strong, intravenous anti-biotics. It coincided with the development of the second molars.

Also loving all the suggestions for porridge. I expect those suggesting it imagine it made carefully for four servings with a little milk and water, gold top for the top, some quality cherries or berries and a little honey. It won't be. It will be like gloop or thick and lumpy with a bit of cheap processed syrup if the children are lucky. In the workhouse it was called gruel.

I've had the porridge they serve in the nurseries and schools here, its fine, not as good as when its made with milk of course but perfectly fine with some fruit compote (which was what they served it with, not syrup).

I didn't like it when they served it for lunch at my school though - porridge is definitely not a lunch food!

If you only know one person with diabetes presumably you don’t know all that many people? diabetes is super common. Many people have it for a long time without realising they have it and the incidence is increasing significantly. Do you know anyone who is overweight or obese?

I dislike cereal and always have. I can't see anything appealing about. I don't mind good quality muesli with a little fruit and Yoghurt. Whilst I prefer porridge, unlike most people, it bungs me up dreadfully.

I always had weetabix or shredded wheat in for the DC but generally they preferred egg or beans or cheese on toast or fruit and Yoghurt. on their birthdays, I bought a variety pack of mini cereals so I didn't have to buy a whole box of coco pops!

I know people of all shapes and sizes.

I know few people with diabetes @PrincessFluffy, one is MIL who has always been as skinny as a rake. It's developed over the last year or two, tyoe 2, - she's 89. Step's blood tests always come back as pre-diabetes and he's overweight, eats shit and drinks too much, but not obese - albeit entirely self inflicted. A work colleague, type 1 from childhood, slim and fit - cycles 16 miles a day to work and back.

Not all generalisations are helpful and some diabetes, even type two is genetic. It runs through step's and DH's family. DH has to be very careful to keep the sugar levels down with diet and exercise - not overweight.

Because, 14 years of austerity.

You're right, any breakfast is better than none.

I don’t agree with universality, though. We could pay for our kids and would happily have paid for someone else too.

@RosesAndHelleborest1 is not lifestyle related though.

Yes I’m happy for ds to eat at home or pay a club if needed. It should only be free for low income households. The breakfast for all sounds like a nice idea but not sustainable.

Type 2 isn't always either.

Neither is type 3 or the other types.

Sometimes type 2 is. Sometimes it isn't.

Free breakfast better than no breakfast. Same as nuggets and chips for tea better than no tea.
The main point of free breakfast is to get the kids in reliably for the start of school and ready to learn.

Rice, tamago with sugar, salt in soy, mirin, sake, bouillon powder, tsukemon (vegetables pickled in salt/brine), miso (contains salt), natto (not actually that popular with many Japanese people and contains a lot of salt) and many things fried for breakfast? Followed up by sugared whipped cream white bread sandwiches with fruit for lunch or more seasoned rice? Or ramen? Or are we thinking of Pocky sticks, dango, mochi, cream pan (sugar in the dough as well, as there is with pretty much all bread) and melon pan?

I'm not saying these aren't great things to eat, but actual Japanese food isn't boiled veg (I'll take a hard pass on raw chicken, horsemeat, eggs or sugar in my omelettes, though) bereft of seasoning on a plate and the children lap it up.

eugh, I was looking forward to a holiday in Japan next year.

nit so much now!

Between 80% and 90% of Type 2 diabetes is lifestyle related so to ignore this seems unwise when we consider diet decisions at a population level, such as what to feed our school children.

I think it misses the point when posters say that they/their kids always have a bowl of Shreddies or whatever, and that's normal, so what's the fuss? For me, the issue is that for some kids, breakfast club is sometimes the only opportunity to eat whole foods, natural-state foods, and so on during their day, and also get a bit of eduction about why those foods are important for their bodies.

If they're not getting that information at home, or if their food at home is all UPFs or non-existent some evenings then that's a very different situation to kids who get Shreddies in the morning, but a cooked meal with vegetables etc in the evening, or a piece of fruit when they get home from school or whatever.

There is not an easy answer, or an easy fix, but giving up on making sure that ALL kids eat healthily isn't an option either. By failing to help this generation eat better, we condemning both this one, and the next one to worse health outcomes, shorter life expectancy and so on.

Binning SureStart Centres was an awful thing. They really helped a lot of families.

In the USA 25% of all healthcare spending is on diabetes. Here it’s £11 billion a year and rising, about 10% of the entire NHS budget. 80% of this cost could be avoided if people ate a healthier diet and exercised more. This is a huge national disaster and it affects all of us. Even if your own life is not touched by diabetes you will be paying a lot of tax that doesn’t need to be paid and have an NHS with 10% less capacity than it could have.
It’s a big mistake for the government to stick its head in the sand, but the sorry truth is that many many companies are profiting hugely from the status quo. Diet and exercise do matter and schools are not setting children up for healthy lives. Neither are a lot of parents, and to be fair our society doesn’t make it easy.
Cocopops for breakfast in my opinion is not a healthy or responsible choice. As a society, we need to do better.