A study conducted by scientists from Virginia Tech University in Blacksburg suggests that lunches brought from home may be less nutritionally sound than lunches provided in schools through the National School Lunch Program. However, the study’s authors cautioned that more research would be necessary before a definitive conclusion could be drawn.
“School lunches [are] more likely to meet nutrition standards than packed lunches, especially for fat and saturated fat,” the researchers concluded. “The findings also suggested that packed lunches may contribute to higher solid fat and added sugar intake among young children because of the higher prevalence of dessert items, savory snack items and sugar-sweetened beverages.”
In the study, school lunches had fewer calories than packed lunches (512 vs. 608), more protein (26g vs. 18g), less fat (13g vs. 21g), and more fiber (7.2g vs. 4.8g). The study added that home-packed lunches were “less likely to contain fruits (54% vs. 67%), vegetables (17% vs. 61%), juice without sugar (10% vs. 22%) and milk (20% vs. 96%),” and more likely to include chips or crackers and sugar-sweetened drinks.
Surprisingly, one area in which school lunch didn’t measure up to packed lunches was sodium content. School lunches averaged 1,021milligrams of salt, while packed lunches came in at 883 milligrams, “even though packed lunches provided many processed foods,” the researchers noted. This was because schools still use processed foods of their own in preparing school meals. “specifically in entrée items.”
The research team, which included a psychologist from Ben-Gurion University in Israel, surveyed lunches brought from home and bought at school by kindergarten and pre-K students at three schools in Montgomery and Giles counties in Virginia. Over a five-day period, nutrition students observed students in the cafeterias of the three schools and noted what children took from the serving lines and what students with home-packed lunches removed from their bags or lunchboxes.
The nutritional content of the school lunch items was provided by the schools’ foodservice managers. Nutrition info for the packed meals was calculated based on serving sizes observed by the nutrition students. The researchers noted that any student who brought lunch from home and bought milk in the cafeteria was still classified as a packed lunch student.
There were several caveats to the study, the scientists noted.
“The sample was restricted to young elementary students in a rural area. . . and may not be applicable to urban, ethnically diverse or older students,” they pointed out. Other limits included the fact that only lunches were examined, and the meals were analyzed
“using observational techniques and not weighted samples.”
But perhaps the biggest drawback, the researchers suggested, “was that actual consumption of food items was not measured. Future studies should also consider gathering food waste data to compare consumption across various schools and between packed and school lunches.”
This is not the first research to tout the advantages of school lunch. A study conducted by Tufts University and reported earlier this year in the Journal of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics reached a similar conclusion. According to a statement from Jeanne Goldberg, the Tufts professor who led the study, "Almost a quarter of the [packed] lunches lacked what would be considered an entrée, such as a sandwich or leftovers, and were instead made up of a variety of packaged snack foods and desserts.”