Lunchbox Makeovers: Ten Tips for Packing a Healthy School Lunch (cont'd)

6. Use whole grain bread instead of white bread for sandwiches. Choose breads that list “whole wheat” as the first ingredient. If the main flour listed on the label is “wheat” or “unbleached wheat flour,” the product is not whole grain.

7. Limit cookies, snack cakes, doughnuts, brownies, and other sweet baked goods. Sweet baked goods are the second leading source of sugars and the fourth leading source of saturated fat in Americans’ diets. Low-fat baked goods can help cut heart-damaging saturated and trans fat from your child’s diet, but fat-free sweets can still crowd out healthier foods like fruit.

8. Limit potato, corn, tortilla, or other chips. Save chips for a weekend treat. Fruits and veggies should be the main side dish packed in lunch boxes.

9. If you pack juice, make sure it’s 100% juice. All fruit drinks are required to list the “% juice” on the label. Watch out for juice drinks like Sunny Delight, Hi-C, Tropicana Twisters, and Capri Sun, which are just sugar water with a tiny bit of added juice.

10. Don’t send Lunchables. Most Oscar Mayer’s Lunchables get two-thirds of their calories from fat and sugar. Making your own healthy alternative is as easy as packing whole-grain crackers, low-fat lunch meat, a piece of fruit and a box of 100% juice (and it costs less!).

The Center for Science in the Public Interest (http://www.cspinet.org/about/index.html) has been a strong advocate for nutrition and health, food safety, alcohol policy, and sound science. Its award-winning newsletter, Nutrition Action Healthletter, with some 900,000 subscribers in the United States and Canada, is the largest-circulation health newsletter in North America. Founded by executive director Michael Jacobson, Ph.D. and two other scientists, CSPI carved out a niche as the organized voice of the American public on nutrition, food safety, health and other issues during a boom of consumer and environmental protection awareness in the early 1970s. CSPI has long sought to educate the public, advocate government policies that are consistent with scientific evidence on health and environmental issues, and counter industry’s powerful influence on public opinion and public policies.