I despair - the healthy eating message in schools

[FurtherSupport]

I really have tried with my DC. I believe the best diets have everything in moderation, lots of fruit and veg, plenty of protein, fats so long as it's not so much it's you overweight, avoid processed food and artificial rubbish and include minimal sugar and refined carbs.

I'm in no way obsessive about it, but this is what we aim for.

The message from schools is all low fat and replace sugar with sweetners. At the school where I work they serve an ice lolly that is basically coloured flavoured water as dessert. It's low in fat, sugar and salt and therefore must be healthy.

DS1 is just back from cadet camp and thrilled to tell me how unhealthy the food has been because he's had a cooked breakfast every morning before going out on the moors for a long active day. OTOH, he thinks (despite me continually telling him otherwise) that the fruit cola they sell at school is healthy because it says on the bottle it contains one of your five a day

DD has started classifying food like this, based on a couple of quick lessons in school. Chips are bad. All chips, from McDonalds fries to home made sweet potato wedges. Because school say so. School who give cakes as pudding every day. Makes me very angry

Definitely agree with you, FurtherSupport. It must be frustrating. As others have said, if you can, send your son with a packed lunch and/or snacks from home.

I think the schools/government should concentrate on teaching children how to cook.

Eat real, eat varied, eat moderately.

Now that I could get on board with. That nutrition, cooking and how to utilise left overs properly in schools.

I really, really think MN should do a massive campaign on this because we are up against supposedly educated people (teachers) and corrupt, self interested people (politicians and large companies) who are peddling dangerous misinformation that is damaging the health of a whole generation and costing the NHS a fortune. We are reaching crisis point with the obesity and related disease epidemic and something has to be done.

I had to fight to do domestic science in school - even 50 years ago it was considered only suitable for the less able kids. I still maintain that it was probably the most useful subject I did. I can produce a meal from virtually anything, including a large variety of left overs - we waste very little in this house - we have loads of home made soups, sauces, casseroles etc, all with lots of veg. Yet so many people have no idea how to cook anything.

Camelhump - I expressed myself badly. Of course teachers are educated, what I meant was that if all the staff in a school are propagating misinformation about healthy eating - including the teachers - the children will believe that it is correct information. Children naturally believe that what they are told in school must be right.

Camel, teachers don't choose the meals, but that's not what this thread is about really.

My main objection is that loads of just plain wrong information is being taught to children regarding what a healthy diet is and teachers are very much a part of that.

Well the teachers only teach what's in the curriculum and they get enough hassle about doing their job properly as it is without making it their responsibility to sort this out. This needs to come from policy.

It does, but teachers have a fair degree of flexibility within the NC, especially with the non-tested subjects.

Schools themselves set the ridiculous fruit only snack policies etc

FurtherSupport In the school I used to work at, we had many, many, many parents requesting that the school have a fruit only snack policy, no sweet treats for birthdays, no drinks apart from water in the playground. Therefore the school went with the parents´ wishes and introduced this policy, although they did still allow birthday cakes. I would imagine that other schools have experienced similar parental pressure.

The NC never prescribe sweets as rewards, surely!

I don't disagree that there needs to be some scope for using one's brain and competency (and like all professions there are those who excel and those who are probably in the wrong job like dn's teacher who extrapolated wildly from a refusal to engage with nonsense)but in the case of the healthy eating bollocks so much of it comes from on high and with a sinister corporate influence that it's got to be an impossible ask.

Change from the top that enables the bottom to deliver is the way to go.

Sweets as rewards I always boggle at. I wouldn't dream of giving someone else's child sweets without checking first but at school it seems to be the way to go

Thank god I'm not the only one.
Change 4 life is awful, my son came home at 4 preaching how low fat stuff is better.
It's no wonder there's eating problems (on both scales). Kids need to be taught nutrition,
e.g protein repairs the body, you get it from cheese, Too much does this, too much does that.
Here's how to make macaroni cheese, can you work out the nutritional content of it? What happens if we use wholewheat pasta? Or add tomato

Not about low fat crap

My infant school dinners back in the early 90s were wonderful - all good honest home cooking overseen by a motherly woman who had been feeding small children since about 1960

She made, from scratch each day, amazing quiches with proper full fat cheese and bacon, piles of fresh veg, stews and casseroles, nice mild curries, bolognese sauces, and lovely old fashioned homemade fruit puddings. Proper energy-packed, nutritious food. Only drink options were milk or water. We only got sweets in class on birthdays - giving them out as rewards is a terrible idea!!

The schools food was so popular with the kids that the head cook had a sideline selling her recipes to parents and donating the money to charity.

Probably all forbidden now due to not being low fat/not being sponsored by Nestlé...

Thank goodness there are people out there like me, so glad there are some sensible people in the world.

So is "their" idea that a whole nation eat fat-reduced cheese ?

I often wonder what supermarkets, farming, and fishery would be like if we all actually ate heathily?

At my friends dd's school they sent home some patronising shit in leaflet form about packed lunches with examples of healthy and unhealthy, folded inside was the schools own menu for school dinners, twice they listed spaghetti hoops as the side vegetable.

I hear you Further. It's ridiculous, it's depressing, it's counter-productive, it makes me furious and bewildered.

I'm sure a bit of digging will reveal the 'interested parties' in the Change 4 Life campaign. They will be very similar to those of The National Obesity Forum: WeightWatchers, a couple of Pharma companies, Lighter Life, Rosemary Conley, food manufacturers... No Health At Every Size proponents or even actual Fat People. There's ALWAYS somebody making money out of it. It's certainly not the paternal concern driving this sort of thing.

List of partners for Change4life at link below. Note list includes Nestle (as in pedlars of baby milk to the third world where lack of clean water means babies die), Danone (see Nestle), Netmums, Nintendo (because a wii is totes a substitute for actually playing outside or riding your bike), PepsiCo (ffs), McCain (they of the oven chip), Asda, Aldi, Tesco, Spar.

There are also some charities but a staggering number of processed crap pushers.

www.nhs.uk/change4life/pages/national-partners-list.aspx

What a surprise there's a milk partner in their too.

and kellogs

I'm not even surprised.

A while ago they published another "survey" about how school dinners are a lot more healthy than packed lunches, and who did the "research"? People who own catering chains. FFS. How do they even keep a straight face?