by frog
According to Massey University researcher, Dr Emma Dresler-Hawke, only one in 10 school lunch boxes contain food that meets nutritional guidelines for children. And 80% of the food thrown into school rubbish bins is the healthy sandwiches, fruit and yoghurt children should be eating.
All of this highlights the dramatic change in the way we view food. What should be normal nutritional eating has been replaced for many children by an expectation that socially acceptable lunches need to include heavily marketed and pre-packaged chippies, chocolate and fizzy drinks.
The pressures that children and their parents face from their peers and from marketing are subverting efforts to ensure children get nutritious food in schools.
The Greens have successfully campaigned to secure the introduction of new rules that require school tuck shops to sell only healthy food and drink to students. But changing the food that children bring into schools will be a larger societal hurdle to overcome.
Improving nutrition in children is one of our most pressing public health challenges, Dr Dresler-Hawke says. She suggests that a partnership approach is needed, between schools, parents and children, in order to develop a healthy lunch and overall food policy, within the school environment
Published in Health & Wellbeing by frog on Wed, November 14th, 2007
Tags: healthy, nutrition, school lunches
on the trolls and those who are unable to keep on topic
“The pressures that children and their parents face from their peers and from marketing are subverting efforts to ensure children get nutritious food in schools.”
The fact that we’re genetically predisposed to like sweet and fatty foods, because throughout most of our evolution every calorie was precious, doesn’t help either. Sure, there’s peer pressure and marketing to contend with, but it’s a lot easier to convince kids to like chocolate than to like broccoli!
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From p 11, Ecologist Magazine, Oct 07:
“Children claim that fast food presented to them in branded packaging tasted better than unlabelled food. The children were twice as likely to prefer the taste of branded carrots.”
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frog, The Pepsi “taste test” marketing campaign was based on exactly this peice of knowledge. And that was more than 25 years ago. With that much of a head start over nutritionists it’s hardly surprising that Big Sugar is winning the school lunch battle. Ah well, at least peak oil will put an end to that. Sugar will be too valuable as the raw material for biofuels to be squandered on McFood.
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For goodness sake, are you suggesting we have the food police as well now? will we see Bradford introduce a bill into the house that takes away a parents right to treat their kids to an ice cream?
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Big Bro – we already have food police. They have dedicated inspectors in major food-processing works. And they pay random visits to restaurants to check they’re hygenic. They’re the people who close restaurants down when they’re found to have cockroaches scuttling all over the food-preparation areas.
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and to answer your other question BB, no we will not see Sue B, or Sue K, introduce a bill that would do what you say, that would be completely ridiculous. What on earth would give you the idea that the Greens would do anything like that?
Our actual food policy is:
Encourage healthy eating by children
* Create environments that encourage children to make healthy food choices, thereby improving health and reducing the risk of obesity and diabetes.
* Create a National Nutrition Fund to encourage healthy eating
* Start nutrition education campaigns that teach children how to grow and cook healthy food
* Provide free fruit in all primary schools
* Require that only healthy food and drink can be sold in schools and pre-schools
* Require that TV ads for food meet nutritional guidelines and that no commercials are screened during children’s TV.
* Develop a ‘traffic light’ labelling system so parents can easily identify healthy food.
http://www.greens.org.nz/election2005/safefood.asp
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At my son’s (primary) school the kids are not allowed to throw any of their leftover lunch in the bin, they have to take it all home with them, so parents get to see what they didn’t eat and can discipline them if need be.
Of course this rule is mainly so that there is less refuse at the school but it is also a great example of environmental education because it encourages a take your rubbish home and compost/recycle/reuse it mentality as well.
P.S. our discipline strategy is … if you don’t eat your piece of fruit one day, you don’t get a chocolate biscuit the next day.
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The taxpayer funds research for someone to check school lunch boxes and rubbish bins and we wonder why we’re slipping of the bottom of the OECD ladder. Honestly, do these people have no pride. They would be more useful as garbage collectors.
On a serious not you need to watch some of the stuff that germany brought in “for the good of the people” in the 1930s. Its identical to what is being brought in to NZ today to stop those naughty fatties. What a load of bollox.
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Hey you left out the red meat. Its expensive these days so the low income families are likely to avoid that even more than fruit and veges. But ist needed fro growth to provide protein and iron. If you encourage children to be vegans you will create more health problems than you solve.
Also make sure parents give a good balanced diet of unprocessed food and absolutely no vitamin, mineral and alt med supplements because they are not needed and potentially dangerous – especially vitamin D and Selenium (a poison).
TIA for adding this to your policy.
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I imagine that the Massey academics have a lot of pride about their thoughtful and well-designed study on an important issue. And so they should.
“We collected all the unconsumed food, spread it out – it was incredible, the amount of healthy food like sandwiches, not even unwrapped. Good, nutritious fillings including tomatoes, cucumber and cheese sandwiches. Bananas never peeled, yoghurt not even opened – a real waste.?
And how do you know it was taxpayer funded? I can’t see anything in the Massey PR that says who funded the study. It says the academics specialise in “marketing, health sciences and human nutrition” so perhaps they even get some of their funding from food companies. Perhaps the academics in question are actually funded to teach and they did the research in addition to their other duties.
Perhaps the university gets a pot of research money from the government and they get to decide how to allocate that themselves – isn’t it great that we have an independent and free university sector that doesn’t have to get government approval for everything they research!
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There have been tons of studies on this type of thing and really you dont need any – just fix the problem by encouraging individual responsibility, parental responsibility and properly based environmental policies like phasing out modern packaging. The rest is just too many generals and not enough footsoldiers becuase we dont have enough real industry to employ researchers gainfully where they could actually make a difference to our economy and sustainability.
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Oh, I see it was released to scoop – I forgot its grant renewal time.
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No, that is just one of the standard publicity things that the marketing dept of every uni and wannabe uni does – find research done by one of their staff that has some news value and then make a PR about it.
It all comes from the competition in education model. All of them are competing with each other for bums on seats and wasting huge amounts on marketing and advertising which should be spent on teaching. And research.
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On that we agree, and the $419 Mil wasted on the TEC. Because they are so dependent on the government they are also cooperating withthe government’s full employment policiy.
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