What Scientists Are Saying about School Lunches and Functional Foods

There’s always more to learn about the health benefits (or risks) of the food we’re eating or preparing for others. Along these lines, two questions discussed in the news recently are these:

1) What happens to carry-to-school lunches once they get to school?

2) Should we believe the health claims on so-called functional foods (foods that contain supplements that supposedly provide specific health benefits), or are these claims too good to be true? Here are some answers from investigations.

School Lunches

If you’re packing perishables in children’s school lunches, this study has a message for you.  At nine preschool and day care centers in Texas, researchers studied kids’ lunches that contained perishable items. They used a heat-sensing gun to measure the temperatures of sandwiches, yogurt, and other foods. Their discovery: more than 90% of the perishable items they tested reached unsafe temperatures before lunchtime. Although about half of the lunches tested had ice packs in them, many of these with two or more ice packs were not cool enough to prevent bacterial growth. 

How cool should perishable foods be?  They should be as cool as your refrigerator would keep them.  Between 40°F-140°F (what food scientists call the “danger zone”), bacteria grow rapidly.  The average temperature of the foods tested by Fawaz Almansour (the study’s lead author) was 62°F.  Perishable foods should not be held at temperatures within the danger zone for more than 2 hours.  But lunches that kids carry to school in the morning may not get eaten for 4 hours after they’ve left Mom’s refrigerator. Eating these is especially risky for young children, who are most susceptible to illness from bacteria such as salmonella and E. coli. The risk is just as great if the packed food was hot when it left home, but quickly cooled to a luke-warm temperature and remained luke-warm for more than 2 hours before consumption.

So what’s the advice to parents?  If your children are carrying lunch to preschool and/or elementary school, find out if these lunches are being refrigerated.  If not, pack only nonperishables or pack lunches in insulated bags with enough frozen items (ice packs, frozen juice packs, and so on) to keep foods cool for 4 hours.  Do your own research by testing how long what you pack stays either hot or cold and therefore out of the danger zone temperatures. 

For more Shelf Life Advice tips on packing school lunches that will stay healthfulg all morning, go to these pages:

http://shelflifeadvice.com/content/some-it-hot-some-it-cold—either-way-here’s-how-keep-home-made-school-lunches-safe-and-tasty

http://shelflifeadvice.com/tips/thermoses-keep-food-hot-or-cold

http://shelflifeadvice.com/content/top-ten-tips-packing-school-lunches

Functional Foods

In case it’s new to you, let’s begin by defining “functional food.”  This is a bit tricky since it can mean different things to different people, but let’s look at a few common definitions.

From MedinceNet.com:  Functional foods are “those foods that encompass potentially healthful products including any modified food or ingredient that may provide a health benefit beyond the traditional nutrients it contains.” (The preceding quote, the site tells us, is from the Institute of Medicine. In other words, a functional food is a processed food-- or example, cereal, bread, or a beverage--that has been fortified with vitamins, herbs, or “nutraceuticals”  (nutritional supplements). 

From  Wikipedia: The category includes foods fortified with health-promoting additives or disease or symptom-fighting ingredients, for example, vitamin-enriched products.  Foods that have been fortified to meet government regulations (such as salt containing iodine or milk with  added vitamin D) are generally not classified as functional foods.  An example of a functional food is tea with added ginger, which may reduce nausea. Some labeling claims are regulated by the FDA; others are not  though they may be accompanied by a disclaimer that says, “This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease.”

Recently, Elisa Zied (the registered dietician who writes the popular website Zied Guide) interviewed Dr. Barry Sears, author of the website The Zone Diet and several books on the zone concept.  According to the website, Dr. Sears is one of the world’s leading authorities on the hormonal effects of food and their effect on cellular inflammation. Zied asked Sears about functional foods.   He believes these are “contenders for the next big food trend.”  He defines them as “simply processed foods with added dietary supplements.”  He says that only two of these have been successful  (that is, sold well) over the years--Gatorade® and Tropicana® orange juice with calcium.   

What, if anything, is wrong with functional foods?  There are three common problems. First, the supplements taste terrible, so, to mask the bad taste, a lot of sugar is commonly added to the product.  Dr. Sears believes that whatever benefits are derived from the added nutrients may be more than offset by a great deal of added sugar. The bad taste of supplements can be avoided by microencapsulation, but that’s an expensive process, which leads to the second problem: you may wind up paying more for functional products than if you bought the same supplements in pill or capsule form.  These you can gulp down before the bad taste could be detected.

Third problem: the product may not give consumers the benefits it claims to provide or says it “may provide.”  According to Dr. Sears, in December of 2010, the FDA hit Dannon® with a $21 million fine for false advertising because “the levels of probiotics in Activia® were too low to be of any health benefit” and also because Dannon® was making drug-claims on a food, which is not allowed.    

Dr. Sears’s advice: Take only nutritional supplements that have been proven to be effective, and take them at the therapeutic level necessary to get health benefits.

Source(s):

Chicago Tribune “Good Eating” section “Packing school lunches safely”

9/21/11

elisazied.com “Are New Food Trends Dysfunctional?”
http://elisazied.com/2011/06/are-new-food-trends-dysfunctional/

MedicineNet.com “Definition of Functional Food”
thtp://www.medterms.com/script/main/art.asp?articlekey=9491

Wikipedia.org “Functional Food”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Functional_food