I’ve read some pretty shocking stuff in the news this week related to school lunches. Just recently Michelle Obama released the new set of nutrition guidelines required for school cafeterias serving lunches. They require schools to serve more fruits and vegetables, more whole grains, sufficient calories, low-fat and nonfat milk, and foods with less sodium. All this may sound great to society, but there are some major drawbacks for the kids being served. Students are being offered only ‘healthy’ foods whether they want them or not. Some schools in Chicago have even banned parents from packing lunches from home, which has the capability of putting financial stress on families. This makes me very angry to think about… and here is why.

More Veggies On The Menu.

Our society is so caught up in the ‘good vs. bad’ food debate, and our government seems to be truly in the dark when it comes to nutrition. Many people put their focus on the micronutrients of foods, which includes vitamins and minerals that your body requires in small amounts. But what about the macronutrients? These are your carbohydrates, proteins, and fats that your body needs in large amounts in order to simply function. Many people focus on only taking in foods with a high micronutrient content, not realizing that almost all foods we eat are fortified or refined with the micronutrients our body needs. We do not need to eat a pound of fruit and vegetables a day to meet our needs. If you are eating anything out of a box, like cereals, crackers, chips, granola bars, etc, you are probably good to go on your micronutrients.

Take one of the new school lunches for example: a serving of vegetables, a serving of fruit, a grilled chicken sandwich on a wheat bun and a fat free milk. So you have carbs in the fruit, vegetable, and bread, and protein in the chicken, but can anyone tell me where the fat content of this meal is? You guessed it. It’s not there. Even if kids were served low fat milk, they still would not be meeting their nutritional needs for fat.

If you have read this blog before, you may have seen Jennifer’s latest post on fats. For those that haven’t, I will give you the nutshell version. Leptin is a hormone that acts upon the hypothalamus of the brain. Low amounts of leptin cause for an increase in appetite, eating, and fat storage. It only makes sense that the body wants to store more fat if intake is low – just like water retention when fluid intake is low. Fats have many functions in the body, including providing for and regulating satiety, or a feeling of satisfaction (rather than just fullness) after meals, and slowing the digestion of carbohydrates, which helps to regulate and stabilize blood sugar levels.

If kids are not being provided a meal with proper amounts of fat, I can guarantee you that they are not going to feel satisfied after lunch. I mean, I remember when I was a kid eating lunch in school. I didn’t want fruits and vegetables for lunch. When I did eat them, I wanted something else that was going to leave me happy to go back to the classroom to focus on school again. Now I’m not hating on fruits and vegetables, I find some of them delicious. Among my favorites are grapes, oranges, blueberries, green beans, and peas. But what I do believe is that they should be eaten for the right reasons: because you want them, not because you have to eat them. Schools usually serve lunch around 11:30 or 12:00, the general ‘lunch time’. By the time the kids get home, they are probably going to be looking to feast through the pantry if they have not had some sort of snack at school. This sets them up for the possibility of over-eating due to being over-hungry.

We need to step away from this restrictive approach and focus on the macronutrients of meals, making sure we are eating a meal with a sufficient amount of carbohydrates, and fat and protein. as well as eating according to our internal hunger and fullness cues. Most parents are frightened to feed their kids things like cupcakes and cookies. But there’s no need to be. A child will meet their nutrient needs on their own over a period of time, whether they have vegetables and fruits every day or not. They will eat when they are hungry, and stop when they are full. Many of these changes in school lunches are not made solely because of the obesity epidemic in America, but rather, in my opinion, because of the personal diet fears of parents and school officials. Many adults have a fear of fats from information on nutrition and in the media that they received in the past. They are passing these fears onto their kids by labeling what is ‘healthy’ and what is ‘not healthy’. I can only imagine the food issues these kids are going to have later on in their lives. If anything needs to be passed onto kids, it is that all foods have some kind of nutritional benefit.

Here are some of the articles I read that sparked the drive in me to write. One is from recent news about a woman that came home to find her 4 year old daughter with her full lunch still in her lunchbox and a bill for $1.25. Her daughter’s school’s lunch ‘food inspector’ deemed her turkey sandwich, banana, potato chips and apple juice lunch ‘not healthy enough to eat’. The other is a 2011 article out of Chicago, where a school has banned kids from bringing lunches packed at home. Either they pay for their ‘healthy’ school lunch, or they go hungry.

North Carolina Girl Sent Home With Lunch After It Was Deemed Not Healthy Enough

Chicago School Bans Homemade Lunches

What is your opinion on the school lunch controversies? Feel free to leave your opinion in a comment below!