In 2016 when we were travelling Australia on a mission to transform children’s health, Goodstart Early Education Centre in Wagga Wagga hosted The Mad Food Science Incursion.
The incursion helps children identify real food (fruits and vegetables), how they are grown in nature and help our body. They learn how each of the colours of fruits and vegetables helps their bodies in different ways.
Then they learn about packaged convenience foods, and how they are ‘concocted’ in a lab by a food scientist or food technologist. Once the food scientist has perfected the concoction to the point where they know people will want to eat it, then want more of it, only then does it get made in a factory or manufacturing plant. We also talk about how these foods usually do not help any part of their body, and how sometimes, they even take away from our health.
With primary aged children, I go one step further and teach them the all important life skill of how to read a packet label. The intention from this part of the program, is to get children to start to ask themselves these questions:
- do I really want to put this in my body
- can I find a better option than this one
In this session, I changed it up a little and after I talked to the children about the 5 simple steps to reading a packet food labels, I asked children to come out and choose items from my box that they would have in their lunchbox.
This is what a 10 year old boy learnt about his lunchbox.
“I need to find a lot of better options for my lunchbox.”
The image below shows the items he chose that he would usually have in his lunchbox. Please note, in addition to these, he would normally have a sandwich and a piece of fruit. For the purpose of this exercise, we’ll look only at the packaged convenience foods.
This lunchbox consists of
Up & Go
- 19 ‘listed’ ingredients
- cane sugar is the 3rd ingredient followed by wheat maltodextrin (which has an extremely high GI rating of 150)
- 4.85 teaspoons of sugar
- has ‘flavours‘ which can be up to 50 ingredients
- vegetable gums which are made from cellulose wood pulp (yummy!) and when had in excess can lead to bloating, constipation or diarrhoea.
- Yes it does have a good amount of protein and calcium in it, but with this amount of sugar in one drink, it’s likely a sugar crash will follow – so in my view, this negates the bonus of the protein and calcium.
My suggestion – make your own at home (blend milk, banana, oats or weetbix, sunflower seeds, cacao powder and rice malt syrup for a bit of sweetness) and put it in a reusable pouch such as Little Mashies.
Jumpies
- 16 ‘listed’ ingredients
- Not much sugar in this one which is great, but … mmm…the rest is not so great
- Dehydrated potatoes is the first ingredient – now you would expect potatoes to be up front given this is suppose to be a chip, but dehydrated potatoes aren’t just potatoes. They are potatoes which have been put through an industrial process which includes many other ingredients to get it to its dehydrated powdered form.
- Again, like Up & Go, this product has the catch all ingredient ‘flavours’. Personally I find this quite odd because it also has flavour enhancers 621, 627, 631). Why does it need more flavours, if it has flavour enhancers in there. One can only assume the dehydrated potatoes and the salt they add as an ingredient is still not enough to make this taste any good.
- Now let’s have a look at those flavour enhancers. Good old 621 – appears in A LOT of processed convenience foods which are flavoured. 621 is actually MSG – do I need to say anymore? Here’s what the Chemical Maze app says about 621.
- 627 which is the delicious sounding Disodium 5′ – guanylate has many similar potential effects as MSG. 635 is not much better either.
- Then there is colour 150c which has been linked to hyperactivity, liver and gastrointestinal problems.
- Do I really need to tell you about preservative 223 or have you had enough to know this product doesn’t even belong on a supermarket shelf, let alone in a lunchbox!
My suggestion is this – pop your own popcorn (not microwave but good old fashioned corn kernels popped in coconut oil on the stove with some salt) and send that to school in a reusable bag like; or if you really want to include a chip, choose plain chips – no flavourings, just potato, oil and salt.
Apricot Muesli Bar
- 26 ingredients
- Almost half the ingredients are oats and wholegrain wheat which is pretty good, and honestly it should be considering it’s a muesli bar!
- But glucose (aka sugar) from wheat is the second ingredient, and there are quite a few varieties of sugar/sweeteners in this bar.
- 5.5g per of sugar per bar or 1.4 teaspoons.
- Like the 2 products before this bar contains ‘flavours’ (so that 26 ingredients could actually be 76 ingredients).
- This product contains a lot of sulphites – these are preservative numbers ranging from 220 to 228. Most of these preservatives are linked to asthma, skin ailments such as eczema, dermatitis etc), headaches, migraines and more. Here is a great Sulphite fact sheet from fedup.com.au if you want to learn more about sulphites.
- Also specifically look out for 223 (which this product lists as an ingredient) because the Chemical Maze app lists it as being linked to hyperactivity but also “Suspected respiratory, kidney and immunotoxicity.
My suggestion is quite honestly make your own muesli bars. Not only is it cheaper, it’s a great way to get your kids in the kitchen and you can control the sugar and get rid of those preservatives if you look out for sulphite free dried fruit or at least minimise my substituting some of the dried fruit with sunflower seeds and pepitas.
There are literally hundreds of muesli bar recipes on the web, here’s mine which I use and freeze in bulk for my family. It’s a simple recipe and the most popular muesli bar for my family. We’ve reduced the sugar content ourselves now so feel free to change this if you’re already well on your way to reducing sugar. There are other muesli recipes on therootcause.com.au website too.
(BTW, I should add this muesli bar by Uncle Toby’s is an improvement on its previous version of muesli bar – they have lowered the amount of sugar quite a bit in order to gain it’s healthy star rating of 4.)
Up & Go + Jumpies + Apricot Muesli Bar =
- A whopping 61 ‘LISTED’ (I say listed because with each containing flavours, there could be a hell of a lot more) ingredients
- 6.4 teaspoons of sugar
- considerable amount of additives and preservatives
All mingling around in this 10 year old body. And, realistically this is not just sometimes (as in sometimes food), this is more likely to be most school days. Perhaps even on weekends too.
I don’t know about you, but I find this very disturbing, especially because most additives and preservatives are tested in isolation. I found this interesting and somewhat scary statement on the Victorian Government’s Better Health Channel Website:
Most food additives are tested in isolation, rather than in combination with other additives. The long-term effects of consuming a combination of different additives are currently unknown.
You may also be interested to know these were some other lunchbox combinations that came out of this Mad Food Science class.
I can tell you after almost 10 years of Standing for Children’s Health, it still amazes me (and frightens me) how these foods have a strangle hold over the hearts and minds of children. In our schools programs, when we pull these foods out of our bag to explore how they are made in a chemistry lab and factory, the children actually shout yum.
It’s shocking.
But it’s also why I am so passionate about empowering kids to make better choices. As we progress through the incursion, you do start to see the light bulbs come on the more they learn about these foods. Here’s an example of the feedback we often get from teachers.
It’s also why in our Children’s Health Program we ensure there’s a Teacher Professional Development and Parent Seminar. The whole school community then has a common language and knowledge around the impact of food.
Look at this feedback from a teacher about the Professional Development.
And what a parent said about the parent session.
Our Children’s Health Program is a whole school 12 month Partnership. The program recognises schools are a busy places and that teachers and parents are at breaking point. It’s not about adding more to their already full to do lists, it’s about making simple swaps in what they are already doing.
All our Certified Instructors undergo 8 months of training before being Certified to work in Schools. They are skilled at working with the school leadership team and customise the 12 month partnership program to focus on what will support the school with their strategic plan. Importantly they are all mums and understand the juggling act of being a busy parent, which is why they are so successful in delivering powerful health messages to parents about school lunchboxes, without making them feel like they are being judged.