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

Glad to read this, have been ranting about change 4 life to anyone who will listen ever since DS brought home a leaflet a couple of years ago. Awful.

Although, in my experience (am a nutritionist) the demographic that this is aimed at have a really skewed view of what is healthy and are hard to get through to. Suggestions of 'eat cheese but good quality and in moderation' are met with eye rolls and 'oh yeah the food police here wanting me to feed my kid plain water and spinach and measure out cheese with a teaspoon'. There doesn't seem to be a middle ground between eating a salad and eating a domino's. So I wonder if the government have considered this and deduced that even though it's not ideal, they can't stop people eating to excess and this might be the only thing they will respond to. I am just playing devil's advocate here as I find it so unbelievable that anyone could recommend a child (or anyone) drinking a diet cola.

The message of moderation should
Of course be a priority as it's the excess to which we eat things that is a huge problem. But ultimately it's the sugar and the processed foods that are all of our undoing. I too have watched the Fed Up documentary that someone mentioned up thread and it is heartbreaking. Watching young people who actually are moderating their intake and leading active lifestyles but remain critically obese because the food that they are eating, while billed as 'healthy' is actually almost void of nutritional value. There is a girl who eats something like a small bowl of cereal and a glass of juice for breakfast, a peanut butter and jam sandwich and a diet coke for lunch, a small bowl of pasta with a shop bought sauce for supper. Another child who's mother is buying all the 'diet' or 'healthy' options without realising they are identical but with 1g less sugar or indeed worse with less fat but more sugar.

It makes me furious too. A campaign sounds like a great idea. The stuff about Change4Life being sponsored by the big food companies is shocking, as is the idea of recommending drinks stuffed with artificial sweeteners. Politicians have a lot to answer for.

My personal beef is the number of snack bars and takeaways people are supposed to walk past in urban areas. It has normalised crappy grazing and food adulteration. I would like to see works canteens reintroduced and sit down restaurants being the norm, with grazing and snacking outlets more or less phased out via some sort of licensing system. And pre-prepared commercial chilled sandwiches should be made illegal on grounds of blandness and insult to the nation's gastronomy (only partially joking about the last one).

Flamingo, could I ask you regarding your training, did any of it include the Change4life type recommendations? if not, why do you think some Nutritionist put their name to these types of schemes? The only conclusion I have come up with is the Nutritionists recommend certain aspects, then the sponsors add what ever suits or Nutritionists compromise their integrity, hope it isn't the latter.

My DS has a genetic syndrome which makes him predisposed to weight gain (he has a slow metabolism and low muscle tone).
The UK dietitians recommend a low fat and low calorie diet.
We visited the USA to meet an expert in this syndrome and her advice was a low carb diet with good fats.
This is the diet we follow. As a result my son is on the 9th percentile for weight.
He has packed lunches, even though the school insist their dinners are healthy. They don't understand that they are serving high carb meals with very little veg.
I really like this website for lunchbox ideas.
www.ditchthecarbs.com/2015/02/27/low-carb-kids-6/
I think the UK advice is out of step with all the findings on sugar. How can a school dinner of pizza, garlic bread, sweet corn and cake be deemed healthy?!

vulcan my god no! Although I didn't train in this country, but I do know a lot of other people working in the field (the main thing I do is consult on cookbooks giving nutritional advice etc) and no one I know thinks low fat cheese for example is a healthy option. This is what leads me to think it must be that the high level of childhood obesity has made the government feel it is better to recommend this as it is easier for people to follow. I.e you don't actually have to adjust your diet at all.

boffin I totally agree about chilled sandwiches! They taste of nothing but fridge.

I should note that nutritionists and dietitians are different. We are considered to be quite 'hippy' and unrealistic in our expectations of people and their relationship with food.

Problem is, it's a manufacturing issue. People are more likely to be healthy if they follow a diet that is composed largely of foods that have not been processed much. If we all ate a diet that was largely plant based, with a fair proportion of raw plant food, alongside some natural protein sources - fish, meat, beans etc, whole and processed as little as possible, we'd all be far healthier. Problem is, the likes of Kelloggs, Nestle, Kraft, McCain, Bernard Matthews etc would not do half so well out of it. Call me cynical.

The long term effects of not feeding kids proper food are multiple and well known. Get them hooked on sugar young, leads to childhood obesity, a difficult habit to break & carries on into adulthood. If they are not fed a decent diet, they can't concentrate and will not learn or perform as well. Quite aside from the employment opportunities it could provide - anyone can put pre-prepared food in an oven, but if schools provided real food cooked properly, they would all need at least 1 real real trained cook, paid higher wages, surely.

I would definitely get on board with a campaign for this.

Flamingo, thanks for your reply.
I would really like to know who these schemes are devised by, I will have to try and do some research on it. Whether it be nutritionists, dietitians, doctors or just some random at the Pepsico office, I suspect the random.

School budgets don't have anything to do with the food that's served. The kitchen/catering should be self financing and schools themselves set the price of the meals, so whilst cost does obviously affect what's served it's cop out for schools to use it as an excuse for serving poor meals. Ours does serve reasonable food for £1.80 a go and the kitchen makes a profit. We intend to increase portion sizes for older children next year as a result of feedback and have introduced a salad bar which is more popular than many sceptics thought it would be, even among infants. Everything cooked from scratch and for example roast dinner is half an actual chicken breast, real potatoes peeled in our kitchen and fresh veg. It's not organic, grass fed meat etc, but it's not heavily processed mush either. Desserts are still high carb and lots of sweeteners (to meet the low sugar guidelines) though.

Schools don't have to use catering companies, many have started to take catering back in house, that choice is entirely down to the head/governors. (except where the kitchens no longer exist and food has to be brought in ready cooked )

School meals aren't perfect but they have improved a lot. It's the quality of food education that really makes my blood boil.

Telephone, I don't think you're being a cynic, I agree with you, it's just so sad and disgusting that these big corporations seem to have their grubby fingers in everything almost.

I've just watched that FED UP.

Firstly I hope those lovely well spoken kind thoughtful children featured get help.

and the fact that menus can't be changed cos the companies that provide the crap are involved financially in the school/governing bodies is disgusting.

and the fact they can blatantly lie their products aren't harmful.......

Only now reading through this thread properly and wanted to say I LOVE the idea of 'often food/sometimes food' - I'm definitely going to use that terminology with my DCs when the subject comes up.

Any medical textbook will tell you over-consumption of carbs disrupts appetite and leads to weight gain, so why is fat vilified when the science tells us otherwise?

I want some cheese now

Since when has science been necessary to govt policy? See drugs policy, dubious clinical commissioning decisions etc.

See Early Years Intervention rebranded "more free childcare". Sigh.

This is the point at which I say the cabinet are scientifically illiterate.

The most depressing part of Fed Up is when a senator is arguing for coca cola saying children must have x amount of fluid intake and there is no reason that part of this cannot
Be soda.

I think.the girl upset me the most. All that swimming and dog walking and the activities. She was physically working really hard at it.

so it must all be being undone at school and through ignorance /apathy of her parents wrt diet

"This is the point at which I say the cabinet are scientifically illiterate."

Sometimes I want to go further than that. It just goes to show that expensive "education" don't always buy you an education...

An expensive education where you know who your big corporate friends are and don't worry about the inconvenient truths of scientific evidence. You probably understand it but you just don't care.

Is there a single issue charity solely concerned with food education for children? Because there should be and it should be enshrined in their articles that they don't get into bed with any of the big corp or big pharma interested in furthering their own agendas.

They could produce an antidote to Change4LifeSponsoredByProcessedFoodPushers.

Christ! I just watched "Fed Up" off the back of this thread and it was terrifying! I'm guessing a lot of it applies equally to the UK though. The worst bits for me was the way the McGovern and WHO reports were rewritten at food manufacturers request. That shouldnt be allowed to happen.