UCCE shows how to pack safe, nutritious lunch for preschool children

If breakfast is the most important meal of the day, lunch just might be the trickiest - at least as far as preschool children are concerned.

Parents, bombarded with sometimes misleading advertisements and pressed for time to get their kids off to school or childcare and themselves out the door to work, are not doing a particularly good job of packing safe and nutritious lunches for their children. A study conducted by a registered dietitian with the University of California Cooperative Extension program in San Luis Obispo County, revealed some unsettling statistics about 582 brown bag lunches packed by parents:

• Sixty percent included three or less food groups
• Eight out of 10 lunches included low-nutrient foods such as fruit drinks
• Less than one in five lunches included a vegetable
• Nearly one-quarter of all lunches were potentially unsafe

Shirley Peterson is the UCCE dietitian behind the study and creator of a program to address the problem of packing healthy brown bag lunches for young children. It's called The Lunch Box - Packing Healthy Take-Along Lunches for Preschool Children and could be used by parents and childcare providers anywhere seeking solid advice on the subject.

"Parents want to do the right thing but may be confused by food labels," she said, citing the example of candy dressed up as a granola bar.

Peterson learned from local preschool staff that parents won't come out to meetings - they don't have the time - so she developed a series of five flyers, one for each week, that children take home to their parents. "The Lunch Box" series shows parents how to easily and economically pack a safe, nutritious lunch.

Some foods are fine at room temperature - peanut butter, crackers, whole fruit and hard cheese for instance. However, bacteria that cause food-borne illnesses - such as salmonella and E. coli -- grow rapidly in certain types of foods like poultry and dairy products, so they need to be packed cold to be packed safely. Others are safe kept hot or cold - soups, chilies and casseroles.

"There's an old saying, 'Keep hot foods hot and cold food cold,'" Peterson says. "That's an important consideration for parents because susceptible foods held more than two hours in the in-between danger zone (40 - 140 degrees Fahrenheit) are subject to rapid bacteria growth and may cause food poisoning."

And what about those pesky food labels? They can be confusing. For instance, at first blush most people might not notice the difference between wheat bread and whole wheat bread. The latter has the entire wheat kernel and its naturally occurring nutrients, while the former contains mostly enriched white flour.

The difference between fruit juice and a fruit drink? Juice is made only from juice of fruit and contains natural vitamins and nutrients. Most fruit drinks, fruit-ades and fruit punches are made mainly of sugar and water. The Lunch Box handout on labels also contains information on how to read nutrition labels.

Another handout has advice on how to make lunches visually appealing. Mix it up: color, texture, flavors and shapes. Keep serving sizes small, too, Petersen advises. "Think small," she said. "Remember, children, small children especially, have small stomachs that can only hold small amounts of food."

Educational packets are available in both English and Spanish and have been distributed throughout San Luis Obispo County. Parents and child care staff can easily print them from the San Luis Obispo County UCCE website at http://cesanluisobispo.ucdavis.edu/.

Peterson gratefully acknowledges the First Five Children and Families Commission of San Luis Obispo for providing $25,000 in financial support the last three years. These grant funds were derived from Proposition 10, which created a tax on tobacco products.

For more information, contact Shirley Petersen or program assistant Kimberly Hampton at (805) 781-5940.

(March 2004)

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