"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!

'One meal a day is not life or death and we need to stop treating it as such.

Exactly! Mine ate fruit, pasta salad, rice etc at home and they are all slim and fit. I think the extra time running around the playground was much better than sitting still eating the 'healthy lunch'!
To be fair, they were given time to eat it but they were the ones who wanted to be out first. I had school dinners when I was a DC, but I tried to eat as little as possible. We had all sorts of dodges, a nasty one for the kitchen staff must have been when we spread the leftover out over the plate and hid it by putting another plate on top! We were very good at sidling out without view of an adult and scraping in the bin. I remember putting grated carrot in my hanky and getting rid of it later. A friend stuffed things down her socks!! DCs views on eating are very different from adult ones. One of the reasons was not liking the noisy dining room. I liked eating-I just didn't like eating at school.
It also makes me smile that mothers should have so much time to plan and prepare these packed lunches! Even when I do one for myself I grab whatever is handy and easy and I generally have the same every day. I put the variety, and work, into the evening meal.
It would be bad if the packed lunch was an indication of the DCs entire diet, but no one can know that!

I bet they surveyed the lunch boxes on a Friday when most people have run out of stuff and are packing their child off with a jam sandwich and a bag of crisps

Not read the whole thread yet, but this was my first thought. It suggests that 99% of all ordinary mums in the UK (as opposed to child-care guru's who write books etc) think that the whole 'healthy lunchbox' rules are wrong/pointless.

If I make a cheese sandwich and they leave it or only eat part it doesn't bother me, but if I had made a homemade salmon pasta salad with peas and sweetcorn and they left it I would be upet at the sheer waste of food and waste of effort. I would do it for an evening meal when they had the time and inclination to eat it.
Schools would also need to change their storage arrangements, for example they would need to be kept very cool in the summer. I go into quite a few schools and not one has adequate storage for that sort of lunch.

"I bet they surveyed the lunch boxes on a Friday when most people have run out of stuff and are packing their child off with a jam sandwich and a bag of crisps"

and they obviously didnt include those children who had free school packed lunches

When my DS#1 first started reception I was fanatical about what I put in his lunch box - nowt but wm bread sarnies and fruit. One day he pleaded for some fruit winders - being a bit ignorant of such junk I gave in and put one in for a treat. It just happened to be the first day of Healthy Schools week and the teacher gave me a lecture

The reason it is apparently 1% is because the criteria is laughable. So if you give your DC fruit, water and a ham sandwich, that may be deemed unhealthy if the meat is processed (which the vast majority of cold meat is these days).

My DD is only at school half day (she's 3) so has lunch at home, but even then I don't vary it much. She has beans or spaghetti with toast one day (a hanging offence probably) and a sandwich the next (often with cheese or processed ham). She usually has tomatoes with the sandwich, and has fruit for dessert. She has a banana mid afternoon and then something like pasta with chicken and veg (peppers/onions etc) or shepherds pie with veg for tea. However the only way I can get her to eat her tea these days is to bribe her with a snack size muller snack corner thing .

Ds has the same thing every single day, he has ASD though.

Ham on crusty bread (no butter)
1 x cheese string or Baby Bel
1 x box apple or orange juice
1 x fairy cake or lemon slice
1 x yoghurt.

Its not great but its certainly not an "unhealthy" lunch I don't think.

Hmmmm, well those suggested packed lunches linked to on the first page all looked lovely, but I CAN'T/WON'T set about making home-made salmon sandwich spreads, or brown rice salads for packed lunches, when I'm doing all the cooking/prep from scratch for our main family meals of the day.

Anyway, so much for 'healthy2 school dinners - yesterday ds was served up Pizza & chips, with choc sponge and custard for dessert. Now I'm happy that it's a perfectly adequate winter lunch for an active boy, but it doesn't scream "healthy diet" does it?

'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...'

Yep,my ds1is especially vulnerable due to SN but has serious eating issues (obvious ED managed atm but in no way resolved) as a result of his literal interpretation of the absolutes of school-food-education combined with his obsessive personality and a natural skinny body. he now hides food,binges, all those things we know are bad.

School nutrition is a nonsense. I'm going in to helpwith afoodtech classnext term(my big thing- wish I hadtrained but never occurred to me) and we are making smoothies; ds1saidtome'and the teacher said if we include X it willmake uslessstresseed,or Y willmake us look young when we areold'

Er sorry? Science please!

We have a generation of teachers and planners who,likeme,grew up in the non food tech era and they are getting their info fromnowhere and applying it badly.

I go into a lot of schools, and only one has lovely lunches that I would like to eat-if I had the time. They have their own kitchen and locally produced food-a lot of the staff eat them which is a sure sign they are good! Parents can book a lunch and go and eat with their DCs. It is not the norm!
It seems silly to make lunch boxes healthy and carry on having chicken nuggets etc for the cooked lunch.

Think my ds must be weird, as the only child who isn't desperate to get out and play at lunch time! Not that he doesn't enjoy playing, but he seems to be more keen on eating. He loves the school dinners, and often has seconds if there is any. As he is quite a slow eater, this means it often takes him almost all the lunch break to eat his lunch!

By the way, his makes him sound either a) very greedy and lazy or b) like I never feed him at home. Neither of which are true - he always knows when he has had enough, is quite active and very slim, and I do feed him at home!!

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Our school lunches are quite reasonable, health-wise. They always include fresh veg and salad (and the children can have both, which my ds usually does) and home-made wholemeal bread. There are some not-quite-so-healthy puddings, but there is always also the choice of fresh fruit, yoghurt or cheese and crackers. And if the children have had a healthy main course, then I don't see anything wrong with a pudding.

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today my daughter has ham salad sandwich and a banana. I used to put more in but she was coming home upset everyday because she was not getting time to finish (slow eater) and most of the food was left anyway and ended up in the bin. Now I just give her a snack when she gets home to top her up.

Korma - have you stolen my son? He is not massively interested but his pack lunch is vaguely healthy and TBH I don't give a stuff that some jobsworth (who by the sounds of it has never actually met a child before) thinks he should be eating.

The sort of parents who send their child to school with a packet of Jaffa Cakes (happened at DS1's school) are not going to suddenly start making beef with and avocado and onion salad.

"I go into a lot of schools, and only one has lovely lunches that I would like to eat-if I had the time. They have their own kitchen and locally produced food-a lot of the staff eat them which is a sure sign they are good! Parents can book a lunch and go and eat with their DCs. It is not the norm!"

Gosh I wish it were.

Lovely that parents can book a lunch too, what a nice idea.

dd1 is one of those that really can't be arsed to eat, especially if she only has 15 minutes to eat in. she is 7 and has half a round of sandwiches (nice ham and cucumber), a box of raisins and a carton of pure juice. and she doesn't always eat that i have started to send her with a cereal bar at breaktime in desparation and if anyone gives me grief about that then there will be hell to pay...

have just been reading an article in the independant where they examined 4 different ''typical''lunchboxes...and one, which seemed fine to me, contained a chicken sandwich, apple, yoghurt, orangejuice and water drink.

But the 'expert' said of it: ''chicken is a low fat source of protein but if you swapped it for ham or beef, the iron and zinc content of this could be higher''

However, on the news, another 'expert' dismissed ham as being too salty for a healthy lunch box

FFS!

Look, given that I was in the school staffroom one lunchtime, when a member of staff came in to ask if anyone could spare some food for one of the kids (age 6), whose lunchbox contained 2 packets of Haribos and a kitkat, I don't think many of us should be beating ourselves up.

Korma - he sounds completely like mine. My stress levels have been crazy over this.

However, the past year I have taken the view that nothing works so I prepare meals that I know he will eat. They are healthyish but with the added bonus of bringing my blood pressure right down.

I am hoping he will grow out of it.

If I prepared some of the lunches suggested he wouldn't eat it. The "eat when he is hungry" approach does not work with him because he doesn't really want to eat.

I suspect this a government initiative designed to 'guilt' people into paying for school dinners. ds does have school dinners, but they're not as healthy as this study implies.