Home-Packed Lunches Found Unhealthy

(London, England) According to nanny-state food researchers at Leeds University, home-packed lunches given to children are overwhelming unhealthy. At one school, only one lunch out of 100 met government nutritional standards.

According to research published today by the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health, just 1.1 per cent of children's packed lunches meet nutritional standards for school meals.

A study of 1,300 lunchboxes taken to school by pupils aged eight and nine found that crisps, sweets and sugary drinks took precedence over fruit, vegetables and milk-based products.

Permitted savoury or sweet foods with a low fat content, vegetables and permitted drinks including natural juices, milk and pure water were the least likely items to be provided by parents.

Just as an aside, I recall doing everything possible to minimize stuff I had to carry when I was a student and I would have been quite angry to find out my mom was making me carry around a bottle of water.

The researchers, from the Centre for Epidemiology and Biostatistics at Leeds University, said the evidence showed that food quality in packed lunches was "poor". "Most lunches contained restricted foods and drinks such as crisps and cakes," they added.

New standards for school lunches had brought "drastic improvements", they said. But with figures showing that about half of Britain's seven million pupils eat a packed lunch every day, the survey is bad news for the Government's drive to improve the quality of school dinners.

An organization called the School Food Trust is openly supporting stronger measures be implemented by schools. I suspect more packed lunch inspections, specific requirements imposed on parents, and civil enforcement practices such as fines. We must appreciate that the food nazis are really wedgied-up on the issue of packed lunches and it's not clear how the dangerous condition will be corrected.

Meanwhile, with government personnel and taxpayer resources focused on performing packed lunch inspections, let's hope a terrorist doesn't board a plane with an uninspected junk-packed underwear bomb. That would be embarrassing.