Researchers compared packed lunches with school lunches and found the latter tends to have more nutritional value.
Out of the 50 million public elementary and secondary school children in the U.S., about 60 percent obtain a significant amount of their daily calories from school lunches, the Society for Nutrition Education and Behavior reported.
"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," said lead author Alisha R. Farris. "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."
To make their findings researchers looked at three rural Virginia elementary schools and recorded all of the food and drinks served as part of the National School Lunch Program (NSLP). The researchers observed a total of 1,314 lunches, 42.8 percent of which were packed and 57.2 were provided by the school. The researchers found "energy, carbohydrates, fat, saturated fat, sugar, vitamin C, and iron" were higher in packed lunches while "protein, sodium, fiber, vitamin A and calcium" was higher in school lunches.
The discrepancies could be linked to larger quantities of fruits and vegetables provided by the NSLP or higher rates of dessert items included in packed lunches. Despite the benefits, school lunches were found to contain more sodium.
The findings highlight the need for nutrition education programs that target both parents and children.
"Habits develop in early childhood and continue into adolescence and adulthood. Therefore, this is a critical time to promote healthy eating. 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," commented lead investigator Elena L. Serrano, PhD, Family Nutrition Program Project Director, Department of Human Nutrition, Foods and Exercise at Virginia Tech.
The findings were published in a recent edition of the Journal of Nutrition Education and Behavior.
