How Balanced Is Your Child's School Lunch?

Blog by: Courtney Standish Hernandez, 

 

MS, RD, LDN, CWPC

When I ask my 4 year old what he wants for dinner, guess what he says?  “Pizza!”  He is the son of a registered dietitian and is served healthy foods for all (well, almost all) of his meals and snacks.  But, given the choice, he would prefer to eat pizza for breakfast, lunch and dinner.

My son is not yet in the public school system, but I am already worried about the choices he would make for lunch once there.  Like other parents, I will put a limit on the frequency with which he can buy school lunch, believing that the lunch I send from home will be healthier than what he buys at school.  But, many parents around the country rely on the lunches at school to provide their kids with a balanced meal.   But, how balanced is it?

The good news is that the government recently enacted new standards, for the first time in 15 years, making school lunches healthier.  School cafeterias are now required to offer fruits and vegetables every day, increase whole grain-rich foods, serve only fat-free or low-fat milk, limit calories based on children's ages, and reduce the amounts of saturated fat, trans fats and sodium, according to a news release from the U.S. Department of Agriculture.  These are all wonderful and welcome changes and in many school districts have been in place for years.

The bad news is that the tomato paste on pizza is still considered a vegetable.  Last year Congress blocked the attempt by the USDA to stop counting tomato paste on pizza as a vegetable.  Congress also blocked the attempt by the USDA to limit the number of times French fries and pizza could be served in the cafeterias.  School lunches are big business and with big business comes powerful lobbyists in Washington who don’t want a change in the status quo.  Unfortunately, Congress put the interest of big business ahead of the interest of our nation’s children.  And we wonder why we have an obesity epidemic in this country???

These new standards are a step in the right direction; they are just not a big enough step.  We have kids with type-2 diabetes, high cholesterol, high blood pressure and 16 year-olds undergoing bariatric surgery.  Simply offering more fruits and vegetables is not enough.  We need to take away more of the unhealthy options served in school cafeterias.   If kids are given the choice between French fries or roasted baby potatoes, guess which most will choose?  We need to get to the point where the French fries are not an option.  Or, at the very least, an infrequent option.  We also need to give our kids more credit.  If the only foods we ever offer them to eat are French fries, hot dogs, chicken fingers and pizza then they will grow up thinking this is what they are supposed to eat.  What if we offered them real, oven-roasted chicken?  What if we gave them a side of cooked carrots with their chicken?  What if they ate it?  The more frequently you offer kids real, healthy, foods the more they will eat it.  Especially if the unhealthy choices are not sitting at the same table.

For now, the best bet is to send your child to school with their lunch box full of fresh fruit, whole grains and lean proteins.  Buying school lunch should be an occasional treat.  Hopefully, one day, Congress will pass standards strict enough that we can feel our children will only have healthy options from which to choose when they are in the school cafeteria.  Hopefully, that day will be soon.