The quality of school lunches has been deteriorating for decades, and it just got another downgrade. As reported by CNN,¹ two Kraft Heinz ready-to-eat prepackaged Lunchables are being added to K-12 school lunch programs across the U.S. as of this fall semester.

Improved Nutrition?

The school Lunchables have reportedly been reformulated to meet the National School Lunch Program’s (NSLP) nutritional requirements, which include higher grain content and lower sodium, compared to the Lunchables sold in stores.

But if you have even the slightest knowledge about diet and nutrition, you’ll realize that NSLP nutritional requirements really don’t amount to much. They certainly do not guarantee that your children are being well-fed.

Schools are required to offer students five meal components: fruit, vegetable, protein, grain and milk, and students must take at least three, including a fruit or vegetable option, as part of their lunch.

While that seems sound, once you start looking at what qualifies as fruit, vegetable, protein, grain and milk, you quickly realize that what the kids are actually getting is ultraprocessed junk food loaded with artificial ingredients.

Pizza, for example, has been a staple in schools for a long time, with tomato sauce qualifying as “vegetable.” The Lunchables “extra cheesy pizza” isn’t even regular pizza. It’s basically an ultraprocessed imitation of an ultraprocessed junk food.

Not surprisingly, Kraft Heinz is a partner of the School Nutrition Association, and has reportedly been pushing to get their wares into the lunch program for some time.²

Meanwhile, the Kraft Heinz Company is primarily owned by institutional shareholders.³ As of this writing, the top four owners are Berkshire Hathaway, BlackRock, Vanguard and State Street⁴ — the same entities that have a monopoly on the world’s resources in general.

Balanced Nutrition?

Kraft Heinz has also partnered with Del Monte to provide a Lunchables with Fresh Fruit option, where the processed lunch meat and cheese is served with pieces of fruit (apples, pineapple, grapes or clementines) rather than crackers.

According to foodsided.com,⁵ the fruit-based Lunchables is an effort to create a more “balanced eating school lunch option.”

These products are not being rolled out as part of the school lunch program, however. They’ll be available in grocery stores across the South-Central region of the U.S. this fall, and are being marketed to children who bring their own lunches.

Lunchables Raise Concern Among Child Nutritionists

According to The Washington Post,⁶ the new Lunchables offerings “could appeal to schools that are struggling with labor shortages in cafeterias and supply chain kinks that have limited their menu options.” However, “many nutrition experts greeted the news with a heaping side of skepticism” — as they well should.

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Plastic Contamination — Another Pressing Concern

Indeed, each Lunchables product comes in a plastic tray with plastic wrap cover, so just how much plastic trash will be added by serving Lunchables to 30 million students, every day of the school year?

Without getting bogged down in actual math, we can conclude it’s going to be quite a lot, so where’s the environmental concern? Aren’t we eliminating livestock and cutting agriculture to save the planet? Shouldn’t we leave the cows and rice paddies alone and eliminate processed foods wrapped in plastic instead?

Both food and water are becoming increasingly contaminated with these toxic bits. Microplastic particles, which are less than 5 millimeters long, are literally clouding the oceans in spots.

Carried along with the ocean’s currents, swirling gyres of “plastic smog”⁸ now cover about 40% of the world’s ocean surfaces.⁹ Plastic bits are eaten by fish and other marine life, which are then eaten by us.¹⁰

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Pure Garbage

While media report the content of these Lunchables in terms of the amounts of grains, meat/meat alternatives, saturated fat and sodium in them, most nutritionally-aware people know that there’s more to nutrition than that. Just what is in these products?

Here’s the Nutrition Facts label and list of ingredients for the Lunchables Extra Cheesy Pizza (4.2-ounce package) sold in U.S. grocery stores:¹³

The school lunch program version comes in a 5.05-ounce container and is formulated to contain 2 ounces of meat/meat alternative, 2 ounces of grains, one-eighth cup of red vegetable (tomato sauce), 7 grams of saturated fat and 700 milligrams of sodium.

Aside from those details, I’ve not been able to locate a full list of ingredients for the school version, but I believe it’s reasonable to assume that most of the individual ingredients will be the same as the grocery store version.

Topping my list of concerns for the “pizza” version is the presence of soybean oil, which is loaded with harmful omega-6 linoleic acid (LA). Evidence suggests LA is a key contributor to chronic diseases, as it impairs mitochondrial function and energy production.

“Vital wheat gluten” is another concern. This has been described as “normal wheat flour on steroids.”¹⁴ It’s basically pure gluten, which can contribute to or cause leaky gut. Other questionable ingredients include artificial flavors of unknown constitution, sodium benzoate preservative and food coloring.

It’s worth noting that they’re not using real mozzarella cheese but rather two kinds of “cheese product.” The food coloring (apocarotenal) is a yellow-red compound used to give it a familiar yellowish cheese color.

They also add “cellulose powder” as an anticaking agent, which is a fancy name for refined wood pulp.¹⁵ Bon Appetit! Wood pulp also provides bulk (cutting down on the amount of “real” ingredients required) and can have a laxative effect in sufficient quantity.

Even Worse Garbage

Taking a look at Lunchables Uploaded, which are sold in stores but not part of the school lunch program, provides an even more revolting read. These 15.12 ounce trays come with an artificially-flavored, artificially- and naturally-sweetened drink, a bag of Cheez It and Trolli gummy candy. And Kraft Heinz wants you to think they’re concerned with “balanced nutrition.”

Vegetable oils, pure gluten, refined wood pulp, soy, corn syrup, sugar, artificial flavors, artificial colors, nitrites, preservatives and artificial sweeteners — this is what passes for “food” for growing children whose development and IQ depend on proper nutrition. It’s beyond sad. And it certainly helps to explain the explosion of chronic diseases in childhood.

Processed Food Diets Are Deadlier Than Smoking

Research has shown refined high-carb diets are as risky as smoking, increasing your risk for lung cancer by as much as 49%,¹⁷ while other estimates suggest processed foods kill more people prematurely than cigarette smoking.¹⁸

Many studies have also demonstrated that the more processed a food is, the worse it is for your health, and more than $1 trillion is spent on treating junk food-related diseases in the U.S. each year.¹⁹

Processed foods promote a wide variety of chronic health problems, including obesity,²⁰ cardiovascular diseases, Type-2 diabetes, metabolic syndrome, irritable bowel syndrome, depression and cancer.

A 2018 study published in BMJ,²¹ which included 104,980 participants who were followed for an average of five years, found that each 10% increase in ultraprocessed food intake raised the cancer rate by 12%. This works out to nine additional cancer cases per 10,000 people per year. The risk of breast cancer, specifically, went up by 11% for every 10% increase in ultraprocessed food.

Processed foods also raise your risk of premature death,^{22,23,24,25,26} which makes sense, considering how health issues like heart disease and cancer can shave years, if not decades, off your life span.

French research²⁷ published in 2019 found that for each 10% increase in the amount of ultraprocessed food consumed, the risk of premature death rose by 14%.

Via https://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2023/09/06/kids-poisoned-by-artificial-school-lunches.aspx