Whoever is against the healthy eating policy, say "I"...

[purpleduck]

Ok, well, I am not really against it, but it seems to be an excuse take away some of the kids rights.

For example, my dd had half a jam sandwich in her snack box. On whole wheat bread. This was after she had 3 portions of fruit for her breakfast, and was going to have another four in her lunch...
The LSA looked in her snack box, and said "That's not healthy.."

I am so angry!!! As a girl, my dd will face so much pressure about her body/diet etc - how dare they start her feeling anxious about it at age 6?

Now my daughter -who is a fantastic eater- is anxious about her snack.
I am fuming - she sits quietly through her lessons, does as she is told, and gets along with everyone...

While I agree in principle with promoting healthy eating, surely this should take the form of EDUCATION????
And if a child really is having trouble sitting still, THEN look at his/her diet.

I just feel my rights as a parent are being sidelined....

What do you guys think? Has it gone a bit far?

It's nobody else's damn business what I put in my children's lunch boxes, except possibly my GP, IF they are exhibiting signs of obesity or ill health. Which they're not. They're slim, fit and healthy. But my son went through a period a couple of years ago when he just wouldn't eat much at all. Said he wasn't hungry most of the time, although he did want something mid-morning. His school operated the 'healthy schools' business, which meant he could only have raisins or a bit of carrot at break. At the time, the only thing he would eat as a snack was a cereal bar, but they were banned! I therefore had to send a flipping thesis in, justifying why I would like him to be allowed to have a tracker bar (although my preference would have been a jumbo-sized Mars bar and a couple of doughnuts, to build him up a little). They said yes, thankfully, but he had to eat it on his own in the classroom when no-one else was looking!

I find it really hypocritical that schools try and dictate what young children can and can't have in their lunchboxes in order to be a "healthy school", but have slashed games and PE in the school timetable so that the children have less opportunities for activity.

I also agree that many TAs and dinner ladies seem to expect a child's lunchbox to contain low fat, low calorie foods - children NEED fats and calories for growth and development. School lunches aren't bloody WeightWatchers

agree with OP, custy and solidgoldbrass.

I think we have gone far too far into the nanny state

Surely what a child eats is up to the parents... if the child becomes obese, hyperactive etc then there is an argument for the school to talk to the parents and point then in the direction of a health professional.

Confiscating food from a child that they have been given by their parents is in my mind plain wrong and very upsetting for the child

I personally believe fresh air and exercise are more important than whats in a lunch box.

i agree with the priciple of it. some children do have a terrible diet and the parents need educating yes, but you cant force them all to sit down in a room and listen so something else needs to be done, i.e. educate todays children so that they dont make the same mistakes with future generations. which is what it seems they are trying to do.

however it feels very much like a one size fits all rule to me and we all that one size does not fit all.

if my dd1 was on packed lunches her ideal packed lunch would be a sauasge and egg or sausage and red onion bun with some cheese cubes a fresh fruit and cream triffle/cake and a banana. i imagine that most of this would be taken off her despite that it is what i have been told to feed her by a qualified peadiatric nutritionist as she is under weight and a whole meal tuna wrap with some cucumber sticks and fruit is not going to be enough calories to maintain her weight.

My ds's school does this and issues certificates to kids with healthy lunches

Ds has never had a certificate because he has white bread for his sarnies (he won't eat brown). He also has an apple, yoghurt, bit of cheese or a flap jack. I don't think this is healthy.

The teacher who polices the lunch box is extremley over weight and we were a little when it was brought in.

Nanny state gone mad imo.

My ds's school does this and issues certificates to kids with healthy lunches

Ds has never had a certificate because he has white bread for his sarnies (he won't eat brown). He also has an apple, yoghurt, bit of cheese or a flap jack. I don't think this is unhealthy.

The teacher who polices the lunch box is extremley over weight and we were a little when it was brought in.

Nanny state gone mad imo.

My ds's school does this and issues certificates to kids with healthy lunches

Ds has never had a certificate because he has white bread for his sarnies (he won't eat brown). He also has an apple, yoghurt, bit of cheese or a flap jack. I don't think this is unhealthy.

The teacher who polices the lunch box is extremley over weight and we were a little when it was brought in.

Nanny state gone mad imo.

OOps. Sorry!

Thank god for my private school.
Excellent home cooked mostly organic lunches provided - today roast lamb, roast potatoes, 3 vegetables followed by cheesecake, sounded delicious! - and unlimited jam butties and apple juice given at breaktime.

Every child there is as thin as a rake. They do so much PE and games and running around they need constant feeding with high quality, high calorie foods.

They should ban aspartame, sweets, fizzy drinks and over-processed foods (never seen in our school and chips only on Friday accompanied by a proper piece of fish), and spend all this misplaced effort on giving the children more PE and games time. Oh, and not selling off games pitches would help as well

Sweets and fizzy drinks are banned at most state schools... Oh, and all primary schools have a minimum of two hours a week PE (this has increased as part of the healthy schools initiative). But I don't think that schools should be in the business of confiscating bits of anyone's lunch, or making children feel bad. They are supposed to be encouraging healthy eating habits, with the hope that a bit of peer pressure will rub off on those parents that habitually provide poor lunches. I do agree that school dinners still leave a lot to be desired (we abandoned ours because the children said they were too small).

The trouble is that the rise in obesity is a very real and growing problem. Children who eat badly often become adults who eat badly, so getting a healthy eating message across at this point is a worthy aim. As all children attend school it is a easy way to deliver this sort of message. I don't think the basic message requires dietitians, after all most parents manage to keep their children healthy without specialist training, but clearly some teaching assistants have gone a bit gungho on the "bad" food front.

i disagree re the training nooka. i think that the 'lunchbox police' should have at least basic training as some of the examples shown here on what they believe to be healthy/unhealthy seem quite bizzare to me.

i have had a nutritionist myself to help me lose weight and have been working with a nutritionist for dd1 since she was 2. she is now nearly 5. its also something that interests me. so i do have an understanding of nutrition.

white bread for example is not 'unhealthy' while it may not be as healthy as wholegrain bread its certainly not bad for you. it has no unneccessary calories, sugar or fat. yes it has refined carbs which are know are not great but so do potatos and we dont complain over those. it is also a source of folic acid and most white bread is fortified and may have added calcium and/or omega. it could also be best of both. unless mum provides an ingrediant list the teachers have no idea whether or not the bread is 'good' or 'bad'

jam could be home made low sugar jam and will therefore be a good source of fruit and vitimin c to a reluctant fruit eater.

some children need more calories than others so sausages etc would be great for them but not for an overweight child.

flapjacks if home made could be good. they could have nuts/seeds and dried fruit. whats wrong with that?

cheese slices are 'bad' for salt levels and hydrogenated fats but im sure that they would pass the test so long as they were in brown bread.

the people teaching children about nutrition are giving them a very skewed view on what is good and bad. also chocolate/crisps/sugar etc are not going to any harm in moderation. children need to be taught this aswell. a little bit of chocolate can actually be good for you.

This was my point earlier - sort of. There are times when children do need feeding up with seemingly fattening food, as in the case of my son. But there was a danger that this was to be lost in the blanket rule of "no dodgy snacks."

And I would be seriously hacked off if some lunchtime supervisor, with no idea of his overall diet, made any sort of judgemental comment as to what she happened to see on a certain day.

Last term DS#2 came home every day with a 'healthy snack' sticker because he has 2 portions of fruit in his lunchbox. Which was very nice and he was very proud of his sticker. But I suppose following it to it's logical extreme he should also have had a 'naughty snack' sticker for the crisps or chocolate biscuits he sometimes had too .

I have no problem with the school encouraging children, in class and in the newsletter and in letters home to the parents, to eat more fruit, wholemeal instead of white bread, less packaged over-processed foods, water to drink more often. Which is what happens at our school. But I would feel quite miffed if any of mine were taken to task by staff at the school for the contents of the lunchbox that I had packed for them. That is what would annoy me about the OP's situation.

My DP is a nutrionist and is very much against this policy.

Eating only fruit and veg and brown bread etc is not necessarily "healthy" in itself. A genuine healthy diet - particularly for children - is a balanced diet ie fruit, veg etc AS WELL AS a little of what you fancy.

Children are increasingly put on diets suitable for adult slimmers - rice cakes, fruit as snacks etc etc when in actual fact provided they do get healthy food they can perfectly well enjoy chocolate, crisps etc without it being detrmental.

All this fussing over jam sandwiches and cereal bars etc is going to lead to a generation of kids with eating disorders.

two hours a WEEK nooka?
mine do between 1 and 2 hours a DAY pe/games/swimming at school

Two hours a week is the problem

I am concerned that this obsession with "healthy" eating is going to trigger a generation with even more eating disorders and general food "issues" especially in girls.

I agree wholeheartedly with the need for exercise and a balanced diet - 'tis common sense really. Shame that state schools have probably flogged most of their playing fields and probably don't allow a lot of team sports in case someone loses.

branflake my dd's nutritionist has said that while she is seeing an increasing number of overweight children she is also seeing the opposite too. an increasing number of underweight/malnoursihed children. not because they wont eat or have problems digesting certain foods but because they simply are not getting enough fat/calories into thier daily diet due to the new obsession with 'healthy' eating.

growing children need fat in their diet a lot more fat than we do. this is something that seems to have been lost in the healthy eating message.

its not okay for your child to eat brown bread veggies and lean meat. they need more iron and more fat than that.

I think that we need to know why children are so fat in general these days. And they are fat in much much bigger numbers than they were in my childhood - our playground is proof of that. As a child I ate piles of food - massive amounts, and I ate cake and biscuits which were usually home-made, and had sweets at weekends. I wasn't a sporty child at all - hates sport. But I rarely had lemonade and never coke, if we had fruit juice it was in tiny medicinal type amounts at breakfast as a treat. Drinks were water, milk and squash perhaps once or twice a day. Crisps were an occasional treat. Loads of meat and 2 veg type meals, home-grown veg usually. And I was outside lots of the time, in the fresh air, doing my own thing, not being ferried from one activity to another by my parents. The house was never over-warm, I cycled and walked a lot. I was never fat, not even slightly.

I think that the whole way we live our lives is bound to make obesity endemic. We don't have to burn energy to do the normal things of life anymore. It's crazy that we have a way of life that requires children to watch what they eat simply not to be fat. And make huge efforts to burn energy through organised activities rather than be doing what children should naturally do. I don't see we can change it by making children eat more fruit and less fat

"But I would feel quite miffed if any of mine were taken to task by staff at the school for the contents of the lunchbox that I had packed for them. That is what would annoy me about the OP's situation."

I fully agree and this is why I was so annoyed to learn that middle son's class are gaining points for their class points system based on their break/lunch items! What I do or don't decide to put in for break/lunch should not play any part in the points system.

imo the problem is not necessarily how much children eat or how much chocolate etc they have, but in a way what they eat is part of the problem as is acitvity.

when i was a child i was brought up on my mums cooking. processed things such as chicken nuggets werent as available and much more expensive then. we couldnt afford them. we didnt necessarily have a healthy diet by todays standards though. we lived on home made soups , stews, sausage casseroles, mince and dumplings with veg and home made pies with chips. we always had dessert usually banana and custard or angel delight.

i also remember riding on my bike for hours at primary age and taking packed lunches with us for lunch. so we were gone a long time. i dont know if we went further than we were 'allowed' to but i do remember trying to cycle to the next town and we did actually cycle to a nearby village . i also remember playing out in the street from a very early age untill it got dark. we played ball, chase and water fights. the whole street played together. my mum still lives on the same street there are a lot of dc's my dd's age and i never see any of them playing the way we used to

i dont think organised activities are bad per say i just dont think that children do enough of them and they are not active in other ways. my dd does three hours of dancing a week. without any other activity that would not be enough and most children dont even do that.

to solve the obesity problem the government need to be showing parents that the streets are not as unsafe as we think they are instead of allowing this media hysteria over peadophiles and kidnappers and encourage parents to let their dc out.

i had a computer i rarely had time for it because come rain or shine i was out in the street with my friends and my scooter/roller boots/bike/pogo stick/ball.

Interesting theory in one of the nationals today (can't remember which one as I read them all)... working with our brains uses glucose and so we crave carbohydrates after periods of exerted brain work. But we eat more than we need to replenish the small amounts of glucose.

Industrialised countries pretty well run on brain work--children in schools, grown-ups in offices, etc, so we're doing brain, not physical, work.

No I don't think organised activites are bad either shesells, but I think there is also room for the general bustling about/mooching activities that children do without adult input. And which so many can't do these days. It's like adults spending all their days sitting in heated house/offices, getting about by car, taking lifts instead of stairs and eating a normal amount of food. And then spending 3 hrs a week in a gym doing a moderate workout and expecting to lose weight. It won't work on it's own.

No I don't think organised activites are bad either shesells, but I think there is also room for the general bustling about/mooching activities that children do without adult input. And which so many can't do these days. It's like adults spending all their days sitting in heated house/offices, getting about by car, taking lifts instead of stairs and eating a normal amount of food. And then spending 3 hrs a week in a gym doing a moderate workout and expecting to lose weight. It won't work on it's own.