School Lunches More Nutritious Than Meals From Home

Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online
School lunches tend to be higher in nutritional quality than those packed by parents at home, researchers from the Virginia Tech Department of Human Nutrition, Foods, & Exercise in Blacksburg report in a new assessment.
According to the researchers, approximately 60 percent of the 50-plus million public elementary and secondary education students obtain a significant amount of their daily caloric intake from school lunches, which are governed by nutritional standards established by the 2012-2013 National School Lunch Program (NSLP).
With packed lunches, however, there are no such standards. For that reason, study authors Dr. Alisha R. Farris and Dr. Elena Serrano set out to compare the nutritional quality of school lunches with those packed at home, and found that those provided by educational institutions tended to have greater nutritional quality than sack lunches.
“Ours is the first study comparing packed lunches to NSLP lunches over a five-day period among pre-K and kindergarten students following the implementation of new nutrition standards,” Dr. Farris explained. “We found that both packed and school lunches almost entirely met nutrition standards, except school lunches were below energy and iron recommendations, whereas packed lunches exceeded fat and saturated fat recommendations.”
The study authors surveyed over 1,300 lunches at three elementary schools in Virginia, according to Roberto A. Ferdman of The Washington Post. Researchers used an observational checklist to record all food and drinks served as part of the NSLP or brought from home, and they found that parents typically packed things like potato chips, sweets and sugary beverages, all of which are prohibited under the NSLP.
Of the 1,314 total lunches observed during the course of the study, 42.8 percent were packed and 57.2 were provided by the schools, the Virginia Tech researchers explained. On average, packed lunches were found to contain significantly higher amounts of carbohydrates, fat, saturated fat, sugar, vitamin C, and iron, while school lunches contained considerably higher protein, sodium, fiber, vitamin A and calcium.
In addition, over 60 percent of meals packed at home had one dessert (nearly 20 percent had two or more), Ferdman said. Slightly less than 60 percent had savory snacks, like chips, and about 40 percent had a soda or sugar-added juice. School meals, on the other hand, were more likely to contain fruits, vegetables, milk and sugar-free juices.
“I wasn’t expecting there to be such a strong difference between school meals and lunches packed by parents. We thought that parents would send lunches that reinforced the sort of healthy habits we hope they are trying to establish at home,” Dr. Farris told The Washington Post. While this is a sample and not necessarily nationally representative, she added that “the packed lunches that children all over America are eating might very well look like this.”
“Habits develop in early childhood and continue into adolescence and adulthood. Therefore, this is a critical time to promote healthy eating,” added Dr. Serrano, lead investigator on the study and the Family Nutrition Program Project Director at Virginia Tech. “Determining the many factors which influence the decision to participate in the NSLP or bring a packed lunch from home is vital to addressing the poor quality of packed lunches.”
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