Title: The Problem with Your Child's School Lunch and What To Do About It | Parents
Headings: The Problem with Your Child's School Lunch
The Problem with Your Child's School Lunch
Is your child's cafeteria failing to provide healthy, nutritious food?
Meals Gone Bad -- and Good
Lunch Lessons
Paying the Tab
Moms Make a Move
Don't Just Get Angry ... Do Something
Be Realistic
Say No to Junk
Say Yes to Tastings
Get Kids Growing
Recess Before Lunch
Go to the Cafeteria
Michelle Obama's Let's Move! Campaign
Learn How to Improve School Lunches

Content: There's also a salad bar stocked with greens, carrots, peas, and grape tomatoes. A sauce station offers seasonings -- low-fat ranch dressing, soy sauce, Louisiana hot sauce. Many of the kids in St. Paul still eat tacos and macaroni and cheese, but the cafeteria makes lower-fat versions of both. They also get edamame and chicken stew, which add vital nutrients into their diet. While even detractors acknowledge that the quality of most American school lunches has steadily improved over the past 15 years, everyone from nutritionists and public-health experts to the First Lady -- not to mention a growing number of extremely frustrated parents -- believes that our children's school lunches are still overprocessed affairs laden with unhealthy preservatives, sodium, sugar, and trans fat. Nutritional quality varies widely from district to district, but according to the USDA a typical school lunch far exceeds the recommended 500 milligrams of sodium; some districts, in fact, serve lunches with more than 1,000 milligrams. The USDA also reports that less than a third of schools stay below the recommended standard for fat content in their meals. " School lunches hardly resemble real food -- they serve items such as chicken nuggets, which are highly processed, with additives and preservatives, and list more than 30 ingredients instead of just chicken," says Marion Nestle, Ph.D., professor of nutrition food studies and public health at New York University. Nuggets are only one example of how schools rely on too many foods that are heavily processed and high in sugar, sodium, and chemicals.