Ultra Processed School Lunches

[Magssss]

Like many of us, I’ve been reading a lot about ultra processed food recently and the fairly catastrophic effect it’s having on our health. It’s linked to everything from obesity to increased chance of cancer and heart disease and who knows what else.

I was looking at the kids (fairly standard) school lunch menu and it’s littered with UPF. Oven chips, pizza, sausages, fruity yoghurts, biscuits, jelly, ice cream. I remember eating loads of turkey dinosaurs/chicken nugget type food at school in the 90s and I know Jamie Oliver did some campaigning around the issue but our children are clearly still being fed mostly UPF. Then we as parents get blamed when children are struggling with weight gain at younger and younger ages. For some children this is their only meal of the day and it’s composed of essentially fake food.

I know I could switch to packed lunches but apparently the percentage of UPF in packed lunches is even higher unless you have the time to make everything including the bread from scratch. It’s a really frustrating situation.

@MyNewWittyUserName parents do pay from year 3 up.

Sainsbury’s multi-seeded bread is from their bakery. It is unlikely to be assembled on site but is possibly baked on site depending on the shop size. It doesn’t come wrapped in plastic but maybe the original dough did.

INGREDIENTS: Fortified British Wheat Flour (Wheat Flour, Calcium Carbonate, Iron, Niacin, Thiamin), Water, Sunflower Seeds (7%), Linseed (4.0%), Pumpkin Seeds (2.0%), Rye Flour, Oats, Wheat Gluten, Wheat Bran, Poppy Seed (1.5%), Quinoa (1.5%), Sugar, Salt, Yeast, Caramelised Sugar, Malted Wheat Flour, Flour Treatment Agent: Ascorbic Acid.

Compare and contrast with Hovis multi-seeded version wrapped in plastic.
Ingredients
Wheat Flour (with added Calcium, Iron, Niacin, Thiamin), Water, Seed Mix (13%) (contains: Toasted Brown Linseed, Toasted Sunflower Seeds, Pumpkin Seeds, Sunflower Seeds, Millet Seeds, Golden Linseed, Poppy Seeds), Yeast, Wheat Protein, Salt, Soya Flour, Malted Barley Flour, Granulated Sugar, Barley Flour, Preservative: E282, Caramelised Sugar, Barley Fibre, Emulsifier: E472e, Flour Treatment Agent: Ascorbic Acid

They’re almost the exact same ingredients with the Hovis one also having emulsifiers and preservatives.

I’d call the first one processed and the second ultra-processed.

I'm always amazed at how oblivious a lot of people are to what's in the food they eat. I was talking to a health visitor the other day about how my daughter is going through a very picky eating phase, and was quite shocked at the advice to try "beige foods such as smiley faces". 😳 It made me think that it's no wonder some children refuse anything other than chips and chicken nuggets if that was the sort of advice the parents received.

@jacquec some health visitors are the worst IMO! I was told that i needed to stop breastfeeding at 6MO because it "wasn't good for the baby any more". (Contrary to WHO guidance). Also to feed my baby garlic bread (another UPF unless you make it yourself) and a lot of other bollocks advice. Not to say garlic bread is necessarily bad but to promote that above BF is plain weird!

@strawberryurchin I can't even fathom how someone in a health visiting position can give advice like this. Surely someone who isn't even a parent would have the common sense to think that wasn't a good idea, let alone a health visitor with training!?

But! What gets me is that when you send a packed lunch in, if any of those treats are in their lunch boxes, whether homemade or bought. They aren't allowed them.

Have you ever looked at the recipes for your school's puddings. They will probably be very low in sugar with lots of hidden fruit and veg. In our local authority, the cakes have about 1/3 the sugar of a traditional recipe, with sweetness and moisture made up by fruit purée. The pizza base has grated carrot in the dough! There are many similar examples. We are fortunate that dinners are cooked on site every day too. "Treats" are not really very similar to their UPF shop bought equivalents.

I work in a primary school. I think the cook does an amazing job with the pitiful amount of funding. If we want healthy school meals,the government needs to step up and find them. And that includes funding for additional staff to prepare more fresh food.

I'm afraid to say that pretty much all the overweight children in my school have packed lunches. They are supposed to be healthy but it isn't enforced strictly, although we have contacted some parents about what they send in, e.g. a child sent in with a sharing bag of crisps and nothing else, or once a large bag of Haribo and nothing else. We do have some emergency sandwiches for those cases but I'm afraid they are made with factory bread! Mostly the issue is too much food, highly bread-based and processed.

No, homemade pizza, bread and cake is not upf.

Likewise with basically everything mentioned in this thread. The whole point is that fits companies are taking the names of traditional food but selling something that bears very little resemblance to what it originally was.

Home made mayonnaise, ketchup etc are fine, most store-bought are upf.

Plain yoghurt with fruit added, fine, but a lot of the "yoghurt" aisle in the supermarket is upf.

You can't make a blanket rule about a food type. When people say "Ice cream is upf" they mean that the majority of ice creams on sale these days are upf. Home made ice cream or certain products, typically from small local suppliers, are still normal non-upf.

@IbizaToTheNorfolkBroads im quite heartened to hear about the efforts to make the children’s food healthier in your local authority - I hope that becomes the norm!

Yes, school meals are free too under Yr2s I think it is. My sons in reception and takes a packed lunch everyday.
Can't really afford it we are not by any means well off but the menu like you say is sooo processed

I've purchased this naked ham: https://www.sainsburys.co.uk/gol-ui/product/ProductDisplay?storeId=10151&productId=1245616&langId=44&istCompanyId=1e096408-041f-4238-994e-a7cf46bf9413&istFeedId=689af7a8-5842-4d88-be59-1ee5688a81b5&istItemId=wlplxiaxa&istBid=t&&cmpid=cpc&utm_source=Google&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=20333793068&utm_content=shopping&utm_term=%7bsku%7d&utm_custom1=&utm_custom2=759-449-0952&gclid=CjwKCAjwqZSlBhBwEiwAfoZUIIXsyOAMSjWPL-Qognas_ZBPk4fQBVjtaDB12w7q2Tekhy0DaIrm2BoC6mEQAvD_BwE&gclsrc=aw.ds

Supposedly better. Would this still class as UPF?

"5 Formed & Cooked Ham Slices Made from Select Cuts with Added Water"

Are you serious? 😀

Real ham is sliced from the bone or a boiled up at home in your pressure cooker. That would be a traditionally processed food rather than a UPF.
This is obviously so rare as to be totally unrealistic.

It really needs to be tackled at Government and societal level like the French; https://karenlebillon.com/french-school-lunch-menus/

I'm struggling to find supermarket ham joints nitrate free to cook myself. Getting to the butcher's isn't always practical so i was looking at this as hopefully a less harmful option. Yes processed in the sense of formed meat, but if it doesn't have any harmful ingredients then is that really UPF or just PF?? It's a minefield and i'm trying to do my best in the realities of full time working with very young children!

https://www.theguardian.com/education/2023/sep/02/thousands-of-schools-serving-meals-that-could-contain-cancer-causing-chemicals

interesting article on this topic. Hope the govt/school lunch providers do something about this but I won’t hold my breath.

Wait till you read about the link between processed food and early puberty, and the link between processed food and mental illness. Then you will be terrified.