By Andre Picard
Public Health Reporter

Dietary experts reveal how planning, dedication and a little bit of fun can help parents create healthy school lunches

It is one of the most bedevilling moments of every parent's day: What to put in the kids' lunch? Is it healthy? Is it easily transportable? And, most important of all: Will they actually eat it?

In the rush to start the day, convenience and ease of preparation usually win out, so the lunch boxes get filled with all manner of prepared foods: chicken nuggets, Lunchables, cereal bars, Fruit Roll-Ups, puddings and chips. For older kids, the bag lunch may be supplanted or supplemented by a visit to a fast-food restaurant for burgers, fries and the like.

As a series of articles prepared this week by The Globe and Mail and CTV News revealed, many of these popular foods are loaded with trans fats, partially hydrogenated oils that have been linked to an increased risk of heart disease, diabetes and Alzheimer's.

But these processed foods and fast foods are also loaded with empty calories, laden with sugar and salt and notably lacking in healthy fibre, information that is not easy to garner from current labels. (New, more detailed labels will not become mandatory in Canada until January, 2006.)

The findings have left more than one parent wondering: How can I navigate this nutritional maze?

For Ramona Josephson, a Vancouver-based registered dietician and spokeswoman for the Heart and Stroke Foundation of Canada, a little bit of planning goes a long way. "Thirty minutes of planning equals one-minute lunches," she advises in her popular book Nutrition: Shopping On the Run. Ms. Josephson estimates that she prepared at least 4,800 lunches during her kids' school years, and never had to resort to processed foods. The starting point was shopping with a list and never succumbing to tempting shortcuts like sugary cookies and salty crackers. "I never took that route. And if it's not in the house, it won't end up in the children's lunch boxes," she said.

(The best trick for ensuring your cart is filled with healthy foods is to shop around the perimeter of the supermarket, where all the fresh foods are found. Foods with a longer shelf life -- meaning they are loaded with trans fats and salt -- congregate in the centre aisles.)

Ms. Josephson said another key to her system is dedication: Dedicate one kitchen drawer for all lunch supplies such as thermoses, microwave containers and reusable plastic bags, and dedicate one part of the refrigerator for lunch-only items, including yogurt, milk, precut vegetables, sandwich fixings and lunch-sized portions of leftovers.

Carol Dombrow, a Toronto-based nutrition consultant, said another secret to preparing healthy lunches that will get eaten is to get children involved in the process. "One of the crutches that parents use in justifying processed foods is: 'The kids won't eat anything else.' That's not true," she said.

Ms. Dombrow said parents can learn some tricks from packaged foods without having to buy them. "Make it fun and bite size. Put cut-up fruits and vegetables into bite sizes instead of resorting to chocolate and chips," she said. "Give them Fruit to Go instead of Fruit Roll-Ups."

Bake the cookies they like instead of buying packaged ones. Give them flavoured milk. One technique for involving the children is to sit down with them and draft a list of the foods they like, according to the four major food groups. Then you mix and match.

While children are greatly influenced by media advertising and their peers, Ms. Dombrow said parents can and should set limits on what foods are acceptable in a household. But they should explain to children why they are doing so to help them understand how to make healthy food choices.

"What you want to do, ultimately, is help your kids develop good eating habits that will last a lifetime."

As one of the world's leading nutritional scientists, David Jenkins has spent a lifetime puzzling over the complex relationships between food consumption and health. He can measure precisely the impact of a handful of almonds on blood cholesterol levels and tell you which plant sterols are the most potent. He has even developed a nutritional regime that is more effective than drugs at reversing the symptoms of heart disease.

But Dr. Jenkins said parents don't need to have his level of knowledge to prepare healthy lunches. On the contrary, he said the key is simplicity.

"It seems to me that lunches can be made both palatable and healthy with very little effort," he said. "There's nothing simpler to prepare than trail mix, dried fruit and some vegetables, but it's an excellent meal."

Dr. Jenkins also cautioned that, in a bid to have their children eat well, parents too often go overboard, cutting out fats and sugars that are essential to growth and heart health, such as those found in nuts, legumes, beans, fresh fruits and dairy products.

He said what should be avoided, primarily, is convenience foods (mostly baked goods such as cookies and crackers) that are manufactured with refined carbohydrates and saturated and trans fats.

Brian McCrindle, director of the cholesterol clinic at the Toronto Hospital For Sick Children, said that in his dealings with obese children and teens, he offers advice that is relevant to all parents.

He said there has to be a recognition that children today are growing up in a "toxic" environment where food is too plentiful and inactivity plentiful, and the role of parents is to protect them from the excesses.

Dr. McCrindle has three golden rules for healthy eating that he impresses upon his patients and their families:

Make sure kids eat a healthy breakfast because that sets the tone for the day.

Detoxify the kitchen by getting rid of processed foods and junk foods and replacing them with healthy stuff. "If it's in the house, kids will eat it, whether it's celery sticks or chips," Dr. McCrindle said.

Parents should lead by example. "Kids today are too smart to buy into this 'Do as I say, not as I do' nonsense."