"Only 1% of kids packed lunches healthy" says BBC breakfast news - surely this can't be true?

[Littleknight]

Just saw an article on BBC breakfast news that only 1% of children have healthy packed lunches. I can't believe this - surely it's more.
Come MN's lets set the record straight!

Poncetastic adventurous food is fine for times when you're there and can bribe encourage them to eat it. If I gave mine three bean salad in a lunchbox I can just imagine the conversation around the table when they opened it at school.

And like expat all my girls could be blown over with a puff of air. Calories are what they NEED. Blimey, everyone's quick to blame Kate Moss and Keira Knightly for anorexia in young girls but imo the 'chocolate is the devil's vomit' police are not without responsibility.

It is particularly farcical when looked at with the 'good food school guide menu' they are given as hot dinners at school. There is no chocolate/crisps/biscuits etc allowed at my kids school in the packed lunch, but the menu for hot dinners yesterday was fishfingers and potato wedges or quorn chow mein with sticky chocolate muffin and milkshake for dessert. DS's favourite pudding is chocolate brickwall with chocolate sauce.

Its hardly fair is it? ok to eat the schools chocolate based puddings but not your mums.

Good to see a sensible quote from the School Food Trust saying they are improving standards for school dinners and would encourage parents to let their kids try them ? rather than bashing us over the heads.

Study actually shows half had fruit, 20% vegetables and only just over a quarter had "sweets, savoury snacks, and sugary drinks". So not as bad as the headline suggests.

Ds's school don't do dinners so he has to have a packed lunch. And no, I don't have enough time to do a three course banquet and he doesn't have enough time to eat it either. Today he has a ham sandwich on wholemeal bread, a (prepacked so shoot me) fruit smoothie, cherry tomatoes, banana and a yoghurt. Has something similar most days, swapping sliced bread for pitta or wrap, filling to mackerel (mixed with cream cheese to make a paste) or cheese, different fruit or drink.

I think that's reasonably healthy. Problem is they don't have enough time to eat and play so he often comes home with stuff left over. But eats it on the way back or at home as a snack.

yuck at quorn, have never been convinced it is healthy. Am veggie and never touch the stuff.

Chips and beans for me. Every day for four years. My pudding was a 1/4 of teddy bears from the shop across the road!

My DD's school send home letters asking parents to try not to send in crisps, chocolate bars, and fizzy drinks. Most parents seem to agree because the school have approached it from the behaviour/education route rather than healthy eating nonsense.

I still get grief from DD2 in reception as others get chocolate bars why cant she? I just tell her it is because I have eaten them al and so there are none left to give them to her

I just made an utterly fattening chocolate/vanilla marble cake for the girls to snack on.

Loaded with butter.

I make them milkshakes with ice cream nearly every day and snacks like onion rings and chips.

Honestly, they're so thin and really need every calorie they can get.

DD1 has to have build up shakes prescribed to her every time she falls ill because she loses her appetite.

The problem seems to me that it tackled from a adult's point of view.
My DCs had no interest at all in what is in the lunch box! They wanted something that wasn't messy that they could eat very quickly and get out to play-I don't think that this has occurred to any of the 'powers that be'!!
DS1 was the worst, and at secondary school (where not checked up upon), he didn't eat any of it until he got home!! He thought eating a waste of time!
Fruit was pointless-it came home. They would have been furious if anything was in little bits!
It never bothered me because they had a healthy and varied diet the rest of the time. The lunch box was boring-a very plain sandwich and a piece of cake.
I would love someone to pack me a lunch box of the sort mentioned- but I am an adult and I enjoy eating-I don't view it as an inconvenience!

DS2 has sandwiches, he has a wrap or butty with whole bread,smoothie or juice,pieceof fruit (he loves tomatoes atm so will eat several of those), yoghurt and either biscuit orcrips.

He's skinny and whilst there is non perfect food in there, I can'tsee its any worse than the sort of thing the other two get on school lunches-yesterday chips,peas,fish nibbles and cake. Quite often hot dog and chips, even (Wales so food rules notas applicable)

My kids eat alot of rice at home, hot not salad but there is noway i would inflict that on any poor dinner lady......i am always sweeping up odd grains of rice as they make so much mess

I agree the suggestedmenus are abit odd, i dont normally support 'kiddie food' there are no fish finger etc in my house i serve the fish the way i eat it etc. but those ideas seem like the things i might pick if i was having a child free lunch as they are quite adult orientated.

I would give a child veg soup for lunch but not a salad as a main, maybe a side salad.

Pisces, I think you make a very good point there. DS1 is not that interested in his lunch because it gets in the way of him chatting to his friends. TBh he sees food as a bit of a chore not a pleasure. If I was to fill his pack lunch with some of the suggested menu he would be even less likely to eat it.

Exactly Piscesmoon.
All the children really want to do is get out to play. I think the girls get about 15 mins to eat their lunch before they have to go outside to play.
How long does it take to eat pasta salad?? Too long as far as my DDs are all too happy t point out when I ask why they havent eaten their lunch again!!

Well exactly piscesmoon. When kids have an hour to eat lunch and play, you want to be able to stuff the maximum amount of food into them in the shortest amount of time. Tis why frubes are so great - much faster than a yoghurt. Even if mine would eat a beef rice salad (which they wouldn't), they wouldn't bother spending the time on it.

Totally agree with sybilvimes.

Packed lunches are not allowed to contain sweets or chocolate or cakes etc (fair enough - not a problem) But... when my DD had a week of school dinners at the end of term she had dessert every day. Ice cream/muffin/cake etc. How is that fair? School with give children paying for school dinners a muffin, but I cannot include a mini muffin in her packed lunch.

Also agree with the confusion over healthy eating and adult dieting preoccupation. My DD is like me tall and slim. After illness she is so skinny you can literally count her ribs. She needs a diet rich in healthy but fattening foods. So lots of chhese and whole milk etc. The same things adults look on as evil...

There really ought to be totally different dietary guidelines for children. Yes - an excess of chocolate and crisps etc is always going to be bad for you. But children are well able to handle this in moderation as part of a balanced healthy meal plan.

As for the suggested lunchboxes! My DD would not touch them. She has a healthy hot breakfast everyday and a healthy hot evening meal. I'm not going to spend ages cooking up a packed dinner for her that I know she won't eat.

Her packed lunch today was:
jam sandwiches (current obsession)
Bag of crisps
Small block of cheddar cheese
Handful of strawberries
A banana
Carton of apple juice

Yes, but attitudes towards food are learned from a young age. If you look at the menus from the Lycee Francais, they are well balanced, not dumbed down, and would be something I would be happy to eat as an adult. This is the menu for children from nursery on up.

One doesn't really see kids menus in France or Italy (except maybe smaller portions of something on the menu for adults). I don't think that lunchboxes need to be worthy of michelin *s, but I do think they should reflect the food normally eaten at home (normally DS1 gets a portable version of leftovers).

In terms of crisps and sweets - nothing is wrong with them in the overall picture, but to have them as an acceptable thing every lunch is too much. I don't do crisps (we don't eat them anyways) or sweets because the are supposed to be treats, and not a part of normal meals.

I think they are comparing packed lunches to school dinners
apparently there are quite stringent nutritional standards that school dinners have to meet so it's not that surprising that most lunch boxes don't meet the same standards

The problem with all of this self righteous nonsense is that the research was conducted at a time when we were facing an obesity CRISIS, when all our children were going to explode and go into a diabetic coma, but yet again, they got their predictions wrong and the obesity CRISIS did not and probably will not happen.

My DSs sometimes have 'appalling' lunchboxes, but they do a LOT of sport, and never snack between meals. And they are not fat and not unfit or unhealthy.

They too eat the bare minimum to get out to play as quickly as possible. They are kids. I am suspicious of any child who sits down and eats a beef rice salad..................reeks of extreme parental conditioning.

my DS's both get free school dinner (but of the packed lunch variety as the don't provide hot meals at either school so all the other children have packed lunches too).

There's always

a roll or sandwich - bread type varies as does the filling

a small pack of fruit/vegetable bits (usually untouched by DS1)

a yoghurt/jelly pot/occasionally a muffin

carton of juice/milkshake/anything that's not fizzy

So - looking at those "suggested packed lunch box contents" - and comparing it with the ones provided by the council for free school meals I think they're totally and utterly barking mad!

They don't need all that adult based stuff - most of them wouldn't be interested in it in the short space of time they have to eat it anyhow!

As Pisces said children just want to get the food eaten as fast as possible. My Dd gets a maximum of 15 minutes to eat in. She is a terrible dawdler unless she actually likes the food (and I mean really likes it) At home this is not an issue. She can spend as many hours as she wants over her dinner. But in school she can't. You could present DD (and I suspect most other children) with the most fantastic menu in the world - if she only gets 15 minutes she won't eat it.

When I was at school my lunch consisted of a ham sandwich, bag of crisps and chocolate bar. I was never more than about a size 6. Why? Because I ate healthy meals the rest of the time. One meal a day is not life or death and we need to stop treating it as such.

I know on here loads of people on here (have read a lot of below) plus people in RL give fab packed lunches, and I know on the occasional time DD has a packed lunch (school trips, etc) I also give her a great packed lunch.

I don't think the stats are right from the OP at all. The percentage of healthypacked lunches MUST be greater.

However can also add that there are some - and not just a small minority sadly - at the school I work at where the children's packed lunches are really not good. I only witness this occasionally granted - normally wet lunch time. But we are talking of a lunchbox full of crisps, cake and chocolate - not even a sadnwich in a couple one day!

But no way is the percentage of good ones so low.

Well, I'd feel free to ignore any menu recommendations foisted upon me by people who think that "A lot of cost" could conceivably a correct and meaningful phrase, TBH.

They are clearly lacking vital minerals which allow the linguistic functions in their brains to operate.

I have just proved Sod's Law, article 25: "any internet post in which you pick on other people's spelling or grammar will invariably comprise a glaring error, which you will spot as you hit 'post' but which it will sadly be too late to rectify."

DS1 is very thin and gets very cold so have been loading his lunch box up with calories in recent weather.

He has wholemeal sandwich/pitta with turkey plus marmite or cheese (always some protein), cucumber/carrot sticks plus grapes, fruit bar, carton of apple juice and either some crisps (mini cheddars or wholemeal Walkers thingies) or small choc biscuit or eg homemade fairy cake.

I get very frustrated by the school, which is a healthy eating school, but thinks that fruit is an appropriate and filling snack for small kids.

I did suggest to them that something more filling such as cheese and crackers would be better for the children (protein essential for keeping blood sugar stready) but have got nowhere...