Is chocolate unfairly demonised as unhealthy?

[JambonetFromage]

DC are supposed to take a "healthy snack" into school for break.

What I send varies depending on what's in the house - sometimes it's something like a babybel, ricecakes, fruit etc. Often things which are questionable like hobnobs, banana bread, malt loaf, flapjack. But it's all been fine.

This week I sent them with homemade chocolate cornflake cakes - these were just cornflakes mixed with some melted chocolate. DC came back with a letter from school saying these were unsuitable snacks.

Now I'm not trying to claim that chocolate cornflake cakes are "healthy" but I don't think they're nutritionally any better/worse than a flapjack or a slice of maltloaf which I've sent the DC with on many an occasion. I think the problem is one contains chocolate and the others don't.

AIBU to say that chocolate isn't evil and something containing chocolate doesn't necessarily make it less healthy?

... just having a second wodge of my Christmas bar ....

Our primary had this nonsense.
We once had a week of emails to ‘educate’ parents on heathly eating finished off with Fish & Chip Friday and the PTA selling ice creams in the playground after school! 🙄

I might make some non-chocolate based cornflake bars just as an experiment, see if we get a letter home. I'm sure they'd be more sugary and less healthy than the chocolate variety.

Try the Rude Health range. A bit cardboardy till you get used to them, but we would eat nothing else now. You can taste the naturally nutty flavour of the spelt.

And the Rice puffs are nice too - just puffed brown rice, none of this reshaped slush with additives.

The whole thing pisses me of my kids are like little sticks a strong gust of wind and they'd end up in kansas. I don't understand why they have to have there food restricted because of a few fat kids and shitty parents who don't know how to feed there kids. I take chocolate to work with me as a treat for break why can't kids. I always had chocolate in my lunch box as a kid and it didn't do me any harm. Instead of sending letters out to the parents who send there kids with a single chocolate cornflake cake. Just send letters to the parents who send there kids to school with a family size bar of dairy milk

Demonising any food is stupid, it teaches nothing and encourages poor relationships with food.

My kids school don't impose any restrictions other than allergy related and fizzy drinks. My girls take a healthy lunch in the main, so for them if they want a chocolate biscuit or sugary item alongside that then does it really matter? After Christmas I've let them take in an item from their selection box every day (we don't do binge eating of the whole box) and nothing has been said. On the flip side, my girls do tell me that some kids take doughnuts, plus chocolate, plus crips, plus jam sandwiches and nothing is said about that either! It's so hard to impose a rule that works for everyone. Schools either have to restrict choices for people who are largely sensible/educated anyway or fail to assist families who struggle to manage nutrition and healthy eating for a variety of reasons.

I'm not going to make the case for them as health food but they're far from the worst thing you could eat.

In fairness skinny kids can be unhealthy too.

I don’t think that there are any healthy or unhealthy foods - only healthy and unhealthy diets. All foods can be included (unless allergic/disliked of course) and this sort of food labelling can lead to overeating or obsessing over foods deemed unhealthy.
Schools do kids no favours with this nonsense.

Oh God I was so pleased to be free of the hypocrisy of the Lunchbox Police when mine left primary school. You can't have a flapjack, but you can have a sugar laden Petit Filous... and meanwhile the school lunches are awash with UPF and sugary desserts....

But why does it have to be one or the other just tell the parents with no common sense that they can't put that in a lunch box

Chocolate in itself isn't unhealthy - however, the other things have additional ingredients that are regarded as more nutritious - oats, dried fruit and barley malt (minerals, fibre, B vitamins), bananas.

So save the crispie cakes for after school and stick to the previously accepted snacks for school.

Both cornflakes and chocolate (with very few exceptions) are UPF though

Taking it in the other direction I wonder what they healthiest 'chocolatey' snack I could concoct would be?

I made some kind of 'chocolate cake' once (one of those recipes you see going viral on tik tok) that I think was just chickpeas, dates and cocoa powder. That's got to be pretty healthy, right?

And almonds dipped in dark chocolate.

Tell the school it's carob not chocolate.

Ugh at my DC school we aren’t even allowed to send raisins or yo-yos for their snack, fresh fruit and veg only. My boys are 9 and they are STARVING when I pick them up from school.

there's no such thing as bad food, only bad diet.

Yum (though no good for nut-free schools).

Are you honestly saying you don’t know that there are such things as sugar/additive free cornflakes? Very enjoyable, & many different brands.

No that's true.

I don't think all UPFs are created equal. I'd rather cornflakes than custard creams.

Supermarket cereal can actually be quite sinister tbh. Not as bad as custard creams, but probably worse than the chocolate you used.

Yes it's all very well but kids bombing around the playground all breaktime aren't going to be powered by carrot sticks.