Blaming Schools for Bad Lunches

I’m with everyone on how bad school lunches are. 

School lunches aren’t just comprised of nutritionally inferior fare they taste pretty bad too.  (Check out Marion Nestle’s list of resources if you’re interested in improving the quality of lunch at your kids’ schools.)

But blaming schools for our kids’ bad eating habits is misplaced.  Schools don’t produce our kids’ bad eating habits. Kids come to school with bad eating habits and schools reinforce them.

Studies show that kids develop bad eating habits well before they go to school.

Some of the upset over the quality of school lunches presupposes that kids are eating healthy (if not stellar) diets at home.  Most are not. 

Research shows that 2-3 year olds typically consume a diet high in saturated fat and sodium and low in fiber. 

In addition, on any given day:

• 25% of 2-3 year olds don’t eat a single serving of fruit.
• 30% of 2-3 year olds don’t eat a single serving of vegetables.  When kids do eat vegetables, they’re more likely to eat white potatoes (usually French fries) than any other type of vegetable.

These aren’t encouraging statistics. But here’s the most shocking fact:

On any given day, more preschoolers will consume sweetened beverages, desserts and snack foods than will eat fruits or vegetables. 

No wonder 2 out of 10 children aged 2 to 5 are now obese.

I’m not trying to let schools off the hook, but these early eating habits are important because they shape everything.

It’s hard to change how kids eat.  In fact, research shows that if you want to know what children will like when they’re 8, look at what foods they eat when they’re 4.  It doesn’t change that much.

It's unrealistic to expect schools to undo all this damage.

I'm not trying to blame parents either.

It's hard to teach kids to eat right, especially when there is so much pressure to get the right nutrients into kids. Indeed, I think that all the noise about nutrition makes parents choose feeding strategies that end up biting them in the butt. Read Training Tiny Taste Buds, Manufacturing Magic and The (Chocolate) Milk Mistake for examples of how chasing nutrients can go awry.

Nonetheless, there is a lot parents can do to increase the quality of their children’s eating, even in the face of nutritiously inferior foods at school.

You can neutralize the impact of school lunch on your kids' diets at the same time that you are teaching your kids good lifelong eating habits.

Here are 5 strategies:

1) Increase the quality of the food you serve at home – and vary the kinds of foods you serve more consciously – to accommodate school lunches.

It’s sad news, but you may have to cut out the cookies or the crackers or the pizza at home to balance the amount (and frequency) of these items that your kids are eating at school.

Also, make sure you add a small serving of fruits and vegetables to every meal and snack that you serve.  The more frequently you serve fruits and vegetables the more accustomed to them your kids will be and the more readily they’ll eat them. 

And, if you want some recipes that kids are guaranteed to enjoy, read Chef Bobo’s Good Food Cookbook.   I use this book myself, and I’ve never met a kid who didn’t like the cauliflower soup. I’m not kidding.

2) Tone down the emphasis on nutrition. Instead, talk to your children about the behaviors that translate nutrition into healthy eating. 

• Proportion: Eat foods in relation to their healthy benefits.  In other words, eat the healthiest foods the most, the marginal and junky foods the least.
• Variety: Eat a wide range of foods.
• Moderation: Eat when you’re hungry and stopping when you’re full.

Teach your children these 3 styles of eating and they’ll automatically eat more nutritiously.  And remember, you can introduce these principles no matter how old—or how picky—your children are. Read House Building 101.

3) Practice transparent parenting.

Talk to your children about how you make decisions.  Specifically relate your food decisions back to the principles of proportion, variety, and moderation so your children know why they can’t have ice cream, or why you’re serving vegetables… yet again.

4) Guide your children, but let them make the choices. 

Most school lunches have pitifully few choices, but look for choices and you’ll see they’re there.  For instance, most schools offer kids a choice between flavored or plain milk, or between milk and juice.  Consider letting your children choose flavored milk 2 days per week. 

5) Recognize small changes in your children’s eating habits.

Small improvements add up.  They really do.

Of course, I would still love to see schools improve their game.

But even if they do, it probably won't amount to a hill of beans unless parents do the same.

~Changing the conversation from nutrition to habits.~

 For more on this topic read When School Nutrition Stinks

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Sources:

Fox, M. K., E. Condon, R. R. Briefel, K. Reidy, and D. M. Deming. 2010. “Food Consumption Patterns of Young Preschoolers: Are They Starting Off on the Right Path?” Journal of the American Dietetic Association 110: S52-S59.

Skinner, J. D., B. R. Carruth, W. Bounds, and P. Ziegler. 2002. “Children's Food Preferences: a Logitudinal Analysis.” Journal of the American Dietetic Association 102(11): 1638-47.

The Bad News about Healthy Lunches

I'm going to suggest something radical:  Don't worry about packing a healthy school lunch.

I'm not suggesting you send your kids off to school with Devil Dogs and Twinkies.  But sending children to school with a healthy lunch often (unintentionally) teaches kids the wrong habits.

Healthy lunches teach kids to "Seek and Destroy."

Of course the goal of sending in a healthy lunch is to fill kids up with healthy nutrients.  But let's be honest: What would happen if you sent your children off to school with a lunch like this?  Would they really eat it?

Unless you have extraordinary eaters, your children would probably devour the banana bread, attack the cheese and crackers, nibble a few blueberries and ... if you're lucky...you might get a bite or two of broccoli out of them.

The Internet is bursting with healthy lunch ideas—This one came from Parents.com—and most of them look delicious to me.  The question is: Do they look delicious to your kids?  It's worth finding out.

Regularly send food to school that your children won't eat and they'll begin lunch by automatically looking for the items they're going to discard. In other words, they learn to "seek and destroy."  (That's a habit to skip!)

Avoid teaching your kids the "Seek and Destroy" mentality by packing foods you know your children will eat. 

The best way to do this is to make sure your kids agree on everything that goes into their lunchboxes. 

It's scary, I know.  You probably think that if your kids have any say, their lunches will consist of PB&J, chips, and cookies. Every Day! It doesn't have to be so.

Giving up on healthy lunches doesn't mean you have to throw in the towel...er..the chips.

You can use school lunch to teach your children healthy eating habits, you just have to be strategic.

1) Make sure that every lunch includes at least one extremely small serving of fruit and one extremely small serving of vegetable.  

• You'll get better buy-in for fruits and vegetables (and your kids won't "seek and destroy") if the "challenge" seems "doable," so make the serving size small.  Don't send 1/2 cup of broccoli if your children will eat 3 bites.
• Make fruits and vegetables a daily practice.  The more you expose your kids to fruits and vegetables, the more familiar these foods will be and the more willingly your kids will eat them. (It's circular logic, but it's true.)

2) Pay attention to portion size.

• Your children will be more likely to eat their fruit and vegetable if the sandwich or other lunch items are on the smaller side.
• Learning to eat right means learning about appropriate portion sizes. 

3) Never pack the same lunch two days in a row.

• Variety makes nutritional sense.
• Variety sets a foundation for new food acceptance.  Kids who get used to the idea that they eat different foods on different days become more open to trying new foods.  Even if your children only like 2 different lunches, make a point to alternate between them. Eventually you'll be able to add in other stuff.  Read House Building 101.

4) Be sure to make lunch different than other meals served during the day.

• Consciously varying what your children eat will keep them out of food ruts. If your children have peanut butter on their morning toast, forget about serving PB&J for lunch and if your children are eating pizza for lunch, skip it at dinner.
• Varying foods across the day will increase your children's palates by exposing them to different tastes and textures.  If your children eat sweetened cereal in the morning (even if they're eating oatmeal) limit the sweet flavors at lunch (even if they're eating yogurt).  Read The Variety Masquerade.

5) Skip the chips—or chip substitutes such as Goldfish Crackers, pretzels or veggie chips—on a daily basis...

 ...unless you want your children to develop a daily lifetime chip habit.

6) Limit lunch items to 3 or 4 items.

• Give your children too many choices and you can forget about the vegetables. Most children will eat their preferred foods when given the choice.
• Contrary to parental expectations, reluctant eaters won't eat more food if they're given more choices. Reluctant eaters typically consume more food when given less of it.  Read When Less is More.  
• On the other hand, researchers show that overeaters eat more food when they are given more choices.

It's important to shape how your children eat before you worry about what they eat.

Children with good habits automatically eat nutritiously whereas kids with poor habits still eat dreadfully—even when they are surrounded by healthy food. Teach your kids how to eat, and it won't be long before they know what to eat.

~Changing the conversation from nutrition to habits.~

Feng Shui for Food

The debate over school lunch is focused on changing the quality of food being served. But the truth is, most school cafeterias serve (at least some) healthy food.  If only the kids would buy it. 

It’s kind of like our kitchens: there’s plenty of broccoli in the fridge but that’s not what gets eaten.  Our kids clamor for cupcakes, not for carrots.

What if the solution isn’t changing the quality of food that’s being served? What if the solution is changing the way the food is offered?

I’m not talking about smiley face sammies here — though food cut into cute shapes is kind of fun, and giving my daughter parmesan snow to sprinkle on her broccoli trees always worked like a charm with her!

I’m talking about something a little more sophisticated — Feng Shui for food!

In an editorial in the New York Times last week, Brian Wansink and his colleagues outlined 12 changes cafeterias can make to draw kids towards healthy choices and away from, well, you know…the crap. 

And not a single change has anything to do with the actual food.  Instead, the strategy focuses on making nutritious foods: a) more visible, and b) the easier option; while at the same time making sweets and treats c) less visible, and d) the more difficult option.

Read the article Lunch Line Redesign. 

(If you’re not familiar with Cornell University professor Brian Wansink, he’s brilliant.  Read Mind Over Matter and find out how he once made people think strawberry yogurt was chocolate yogurt.)

You should consider making the same environmental changes in your home cafeteria.

Our kids’ eating problem doesn’t start in schools.  A recent survey shows:

• 1/3 of toddlers and 50% of preschoolers eat fast food at least once a week.
• 25% of older infants, toddlers and preschoolers do not eat a single serving of fruit on a given day and 30% do not eat a single serving of vegetables.
• French fries are the most popular vegetable among toddlers and preschoolers.

Our toddlers really are French Fry-eating, soda-swilling little teens in training.  Read more about this survey. 

Here are the researchers' 12 changes for redesigning school cafeterias to encourage healthier eating.

And how you can mimic these strategies in your home.

1. “Placing nutritious foods like broccoli at the beginning of the lunch line rather than in the middle, increased the amount students purchased by 10 percent to 15 percent.”

Serve vegetables (or salad) before a meal when your kids are hungry and wanting to snack. Also consider the beginning of a meal when there are no competing foods.

2. “Students given a choice between carrots and celery were much more likely to eat their vegetables than students forced to take only carrots.”

If you don't feel like cooking multiple veggies every day, try keeping a selection of raw or cooked vegetables in serving bowls in the refrigerator.  Put these on the table during meals and ask your children to help themselves from at least two of the bowls.  Change what you put in the bowls from week to week.

3. “Putting apples and oranges in a fruit bowl, rather than a stainless steel pan, more than doubled fruit sales.”

Keep fruit in a fruit bowl in the refrigerator instead of in the fruit bin.  During snack time put the fruit bowl on the kitchen counter or table.  Consider putting out a platter of veggies too.

4. “Pulling the salad bar away from the wall and putting it in front of the checkout register nearly tripled sales of salads.”

Arrange your refrigerator and cabinets so the food you’re trying to “sell” is front-and-center.

5. “When cafeteria workers asked each child, “Do you want a salad?” salad sales increased by a third.”

Consistently “sell” the foods you’ve put front-and-center.  But don't use a hard sell. (Notice that the cafeteria workers aren’t withholding dessert from kids who won’t eat salad. Neither should you.) Ask your children each day if they want a serving of salad, of vegetables, of any of the food you hope they’ll eat. Over time they will.

6. “Moving the chocolate milk behind the plain milk led students to buy more plain milk.”

Get down to your kids’ level and see what they see. Then make sure the milk and water are at eye level. This may mean keeping a reachable jug of water in the refrigerator, and moving other beverages to the back of a higher shelf.

7. “Giving healthy food choices more descriptive names — for example, “creamy corn” rather than “corn” — increased their sales by 27 percent.”

Channel your inner writer and get creative, colorful (or even gross). The more descriptive you are the better your sales will be.

8. “Keeping ice cream in a freezer with a closed opaque top significantly reduced ice cream sales.”

Move sweets and treats to the least visible spot in the kitchen. Consider also putting them inside opaque plastic containers.

9. “Decreasing the size of bowls from 18 ounces to 14 ounces reduced the size of the average cereal serving at breakfast by 24 percent.”

Use smaller plates and bowls to serve foods you want your children to consume less of and use larger plates and bowls for foods you want your kids to eat in greater quantities.

10. “Creating a speedy “healthy express” checkout line for students who were not buying desserts and chips doubled the sales of healthy sandwiches.”

Learn to dawdle. Be quick with healthy food and slow with sweets and treats.  (One way to ensure you’ll be slow is if you have to drive to the supermarket to buy whatever it is your kids are requesting because you don’t keep it around!)

11. “A “cash for cookies” policy — that is, forbidding the use of lunch tickets for desserts — led students to buy 71 percent more fruit and 55 percent fewer desserts.”

Consider providing a few sweets and treats and then charging your kids for extras, either with real money, TV time, or with chores!

12. Requiring or encouraging the use of cafeteria trays increased vegetable consumption: students without trays eat 21 percent less salad but no less ice cream.

Kids can only carry so much and when they have to lighten the load, you know which items gotta go.  Plate the food you want your children to eat, and have them sit while eating.  It’s your best bet for getting your kids to eat more than their one, true favorite.

If you want to know more about how the environment influences eating, read Wansink’s book Mindless Eating. 

It’s an easy, informative read. More importantly, it’s makes a great case for why It’s Not About Nutrition.

~ Changing the conversation from nutrition to habits. ~