How healthy is a child's packed lunch?

Healthy lunch

How healthy would you define the packed lunch that you give your child? Parents may define the packed lunch they are giving their child as healthy, but new research of its kind has found that only one percent of packed lunches are meeting nutritional standards set for schools.

The study found that packed lunches are filled with crisps, sweets and sugary drinks, instead of the recommended vegetables, fruit and milk.

In Britain, around four million schoolchildren eat a packed lunch - the equivalent of more than 5.5 billion lunches per year.

Commissioned by the Food Standards Agency, the researchers from the University of Leeds found that if the nutritional standards set for school meals were applied to packed lunches, only one percent of those brought in by children would comply.

The first statutory school meal standards were introduced in 2006 due to growing evidence linking poor health in adults with obesity or poor diet in childhood. They limit the amount of foods high in salt, sugar and fats that can be served and stipulate that school meals must provide a third of the daily requirement of every nutrient for health, the British paper The Guardian states.

The analysis of 1300 packed lunches for children aged between eight and nine in schools across Britain was published online ahead of print in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health, the British paper The Telegraph states.

All the children took a packed lunch to school on at least one day of the week, and almost nine out of 10 ate a packed lunch every day.

The research

The most common items found in the lunch boxes, were sandwiches, sweets, savoury snacks and artificially sweetened drinks.

Foods that would be allowed in schools meals were found to be the least likely to be provided in lunch boxes, with only one in ten children having sandwiches with vegetables in them and a further one in ten being given a portion of vegetables.

To conduct the research, the contents of the lunch boxes were recorded before and after the meal so that the researchers could discover which foods the child ate and what they left.

Through this method, they found that the children were most likely to eat the confectionery and least likely to eat the fruit.

More than a quarter of children had a lunch box that contained sweets, savoury snacks like crisps and a sugary drink.

Another quarter had a similar lunch box without a sugary drink and fewer than one in ten had lunch boxes with none of these items.

Less than half of the lunch boxes had foods with sufficient levels of vitamin A, folate, iron and zinc.

On average, girls tended to eat healthier foods, and children at schools with fewer pupils eligible for free school meals had healthier packed lunches.

Results

Charlotte Evans, of Nutritional Epidemiology Group, Centre for Epidemiology and Biostatistics, University of Leeds, said, "One percent of children's packed lunches met all the food-based school meal standards for school meals in England, evidence that the quality of food in children's packed lunches is poor.

"This is partly due to the fact that packed lunches, by definition, only contain foods that can be packed for the day. Few lunches contained all five healthy food groups (starch, protein, vegetables, fruit and dairy), but most lunches contained restricted foods and drinks such as crisps or cakes.

"Few children were provided with vegetables or salad in their lunch; similar to previous studies."

The study found that the packed lunches were low in fibre and high in salt and sugar.

Evans states, "Since 2004, there may have been some improvements in the nutritional profile of packed lunches due to changes in the composition of some manufactured foods; however, there have been no improvements in children's packed lunches in terms of the types of food provided."

There is concern over the quality of school lunches due to the rising obesity level. The main concern is obesity levels in children, as research has found that one in three schoolchildren are now classed as obese, which can lead to problems later in life.

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