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

Oh the eggs get eaten betty, just not by the kids

Hadn't heard of this as I'm in Scotland. How depressing to read about it.

How nasty to tell a nine year old that she shouldn't have cheese and pine nuts. Why on earth couldn't that adult have kept her mouth shut. What an ignorant jobsworth. That person must have very mixed up ideas about nutrition and also be very insecure.

The contents of the childrens' packed lunches should be no business of the school anyway (unless there were strong suspicions of abuse). What a horrible job it must be if it involves inspecting lunch boxes and pointing out how mummy got it wrong.

Aspartame is banned in some countries.

I don't believe it's all that difficult to cook healthy meals from scratch cheaply either; lentil soup, curry, burgers, chili, lasagne, lamb (price has never been cheaper - poor farmers) hotpot with barley, risotto either rice or barley, mince and tatties - incredibly easy, spag bol - even easier, baked potatoes with baked beans, tuna mayo, egg mayo, cheese and salad. Sorry but what's difficult about that?

I wonder if lots of school dinner ladies got a backdated payrise to match their salaries with the equivalent 'male' council jobs. And now they're considered too expensive?

Politicians are chicken. They're all apparently terrified of big corporations. Maybe they have good reason to be......

What would happen if you refused to co-operate with the guidelines and repeatedly sent in the wrong cheese? Would they starve your child or try to force feed 'em?

FurtherSupport job perks? glad they are not wasted but that just seems really really silly!

How would they know if cheese was low fat or not if not in a wrapper.

does that mean things like cheese strings would get through yet cubes of cathedral city wouldn't?

Having seen some job ads for school lunch/midday supervisors there is nothing about being qualified to pontificate on the nutritional value of lunch boxes.

Not knocking the people that do those jobs at all. These are important and necessary jobs requiring lots of important skills (like empathy, patience, the ability to manage small children) but they are not educated nutritionists and some have had very poor educations generally so are not in a position to argue with the powers that be or critically evaluate the information on nutrition that they receive via the media or their gym or somewhere like a slimming club.

Or even their yoga teacher.

I heard some of the must ludicrous stuff come out of my old yoga teacher's mouth.

Rogue Politicians are so scared of the big corporations that they sit on their boards as non-executive directors!

Randomly but I went shopping today and wanted decent meat with fat for a beef stew. As the fat helps the fibres break down so it's lovely and soft
Lean meat everywhere. Ask at the butchers counter. Nope, all lean
I wasn't asking for anything coated in lard, just meat with some marbling rather than stripped of all fat!
Don't get me started on muller lights etc - better to have some FF greek yog with berries

Happy36 spill the names!

Sorry for my outburst about lunch supervisors. I didn't use the word 'ignorant' unkindly but 'jobsworth' is not nice.

Although I still think it can't leave you feeling good if you're job involves needlessly upsetting little children....

Oh I do hope the MN collective can do something on this. I don't even have DC and I'm at the stories frequently on here. Sometimes it feels like if you tried, you couldn't design a programme more likely to mess up children's relationship with food.

I'd love to see one of MN's many scientific posters set up some proper research.

Who is setting the rules in each school?

What qualifications do they have to do so?

What rules are being set? (So many horror stories of adults projecting their latest weightloss diet onto growing children.)

What concepts are the children coming away with? (Foods as "good", "bad", "naughty" "reward".)

What are the mixed messages the children are getting from different people? (Sweets as naughty, as reward, olive oil bad because it has a red traffic light, children's anxiety at parents serving "harmful" food, etc).

Not to mention a long term study into eating habits into adulthood.

This is quite old (2010), but I imagine still relevant
www.theguardian.com/politics/2010/dec/09/health-policy-extent-corporate-influence

Yes the good foods and bad foods wind me up! They shouldn't be good and bad.
proper education on nutrition would teach which foods you should have a little of and which are ok to have more.
We need some fat, some fats are good, but they all get bundled in 'bad'

BathshebaDarkstone if she's hungry could you not give her a bit more breakfast at 7 to see her through ? Mine eats like a horse first thing in the morning but isn't normally so fussed by lunch

As I am reading this thread I am getting increasingly anxious for when my DS starts school, he's only just started weaning and I can't imagine what crap will be taught to him about food when he goes. It was bad enough when my older DCs were at school (all in their 20s now) being told a load of b**cks about what was healthy. I shall be teaching baby DS the same as I did the other DCs, no sugar free crap, processed crap etc just good NUTRITIOUS foods etc and everything else in moderation.

Has anyone tried sending their dc with cooked food? I saw those thermos food containers so you can keep hot meals hot all day I was tempted to get myself one for work, but I saw they spacifically make children's ones I wondered how spanish chicken or veg korma would go down with lunch box police?

I've sent in soup. had no problems

These are OUR children, who are THEY to dictate and decide what they eat? Of course, there are exceptions (eg, sending a child to school with a pack of flumps and a Kit Kat for lunch) BUT the situation with food etc seems to be getting out of hand pathetic IMO. We need to do something now.

I've sent hot pasta in before, it was fine. No problem from the lunch box police other than them trying to make him eat it all and I'd accidentally done Big portion!

It is fine to tell schools to fuck off out of your children's lunchbox. Most schools apply pseudo-science to all things nutritional and haven't a clue anyway. You can legally feed your children what you like as long as it's not a cold McDonald's or a lunchbox full of sweets and nothing else) every day (in which case it is reasonable for a note to go home, I reckon by anyone's standards).

PS I would suggest that keeping meat above 50C or whatever the food hygiene temp is supposed to be for up to 5 hours in a thermos is not the best plan scientifically speaking. Probably safer to go veggie for that.

Ugh.

We don't have Change 4 Life in America but our problem with sugar is just as bad, probably much worse. I just watched the Fed Up documentary and I am disgusted.

Our school meals are okay-ish. All grains (bread, pasta etc) are brown not white and there is always a fresh veggie or fruit. Chocolate milk on Fridays only. I don't mind that as an occasional treat. A cookie or cinnamon roll maybe once a month, no cake ever. The main part of the meal is usually not good though. Chicken patties etc.

I am going to try to send DS's lunch more often in the coming year but I seem to rely a lot on processed meats which isn't good. I'll have to put in some thought! We eat pretty well at home.

There is always a veg AND a fruit, to clarify. But they aren't always both fresh :)

Yes Boffin, there are still ways we can make sure our children only eat what we want them to eat at least in primary(more or less, if you discount school cookery and sweet rewards) but we can't protect them from the nonsense lessons they get about what a healthy diet is.

The whole point of these programmes is to educate children for life and it scares me to death that that's what's happening. My Dc believe that a commercial cereal bar is healthy and homemade fruit cake is bad because that's the message they get at school on a daily basis - we don't have fruit only snack, cereal bars are allowed but cakes and biscuits are not

Teachers and other school staff are to be believed and provide life long lessons, otherwise what's the point of all the other subjects they teach?

As an aside about the thermos - we have one but hardly use it. I worry too much, as Boffin says, that it's simply a germ incubator ...

Agree again with further.