Yesterday we discussed public school classroom party food.  Today we’re tackling classroom snacks.

My question is about school snacks for classroom parties. My son will be in first grade this year, well tomorrow 🙂 , and I was asked to oversee all the parties for the entire school. I would like to compile a list of healthy, nut free snacks that the other parents can refer to. The main problem is that everything must have a nutritional label on it, no homemade snacks, to “prove” that the snack isn’t too high in fat, calories, sodium, etc. Any ideas would be greatly appreciated! Thank you 🙂

Ironically, many school wellness policies make it almost impossible for parents to provide food for classroom snacks that won’t be a distraction to the learning process. They state that only store bought snacks that come with labels showing nutrition information are the best way to protect allergy kids from exposures and all students from unhealthy snacks with too much sodium, fat, calories, etc.

Processed food is not healthy

I know many kids are used to being fed goldfish, pretzels, yogurt and fruit snacks to quell their between meal hunger, but these snacks do not do what a snack should do.  Teachers and parents need snacks to provide kids with nourishment between meals so students can stay focused on learning objectives. Brain cells are greedy, they require two times of the energy other cells in the body need.  If the quality of the energy from food is lacking, the brain is not adequately fueled. This makes it hard for some students to focus, pay attention, follow rules, behave and build the skills the teacher is teaching.  For other students who are on the various learning and behavior disorder spectrums like ASD (autism), ADHD/ADD (behaviour/learning) and sensory processing and vision disorders, a starved brain makes it nearly impossible for them to be in the classroom in a productive way.

Natural and artificial flavors

Most people are unaware that the snack in the package, while it may meet low sodium, fat and calorie requirements, actually contains other ingredients that have been manufactured in a factory specifically to trick brains into thinking they are more delicious and tasty than the food actually is.  These are usually natural or artificial flavors.  The flavors entice your child to eat too much of these snack foods, reducing their hunger for the real food that you may send in their lunch box, for after school snacks or dinner.

Excite toxins and neurotoxins

some ingredients are toxic to the various bits and pieces in the brain that are responsible for memory, learning, fact recall, connections between knowledge that allows kids to apply knowledge in difference scenarios.  They are called excitotoxins and neurotoxins.  These ingredients are also manufactured in factories and are used by food manufacturers to improve taste, palatibility appearance and acceptance of a food.   Petrochemical food dyes fall in this category.  Sure that gogurt looks like it’s made from strawberries, but there may be no actual fruit in the snack.  Not only is it lacking in fruit which would nourish a learning brain, it is actually sub-lethally neurotoxic.   MSG and it’s derivatives like the protein isolates common in most “high protein” snacks also fall in this category.

Students don’t fall over dead when they eat gogurt or cereal bars, nor do they go into convulsions or lose consciousness.  Those would be acute severe reactions. Our kids respond to these artificial and toxic ingredients in a chronic way.  They generally make it harder for them to follow directions, stay focused, pay attention, learn without interventions.  It is so chronic that as parents and educators we think these reactions are “normal” kid behavior.

Sodium

There are tons of minerals in natural real salt.  each cell in the human body needs minerals to perform their vital functions.  When we serve kids snacks made with chemically altered “table” salt we strip out many of the trace minerals needed by their growing developing body.  Further, the salt used in processed food has gone through a refining process that adds other chemicals to the salt.  They are chemicals that your body doesn’t recognize and doesn’t know how to metabolize.  The body treats them as toxins and it attempts to remove them from the digestive system.  The sodium in processed food is not beneficial, but also harmful.  That is not the case when we use unrefined real salt with trace minerals to season our food.

Fat

I know there is a craze to make everything low fat and healthy.  But this doesn’t make sense.  Look at nature.  What do animals eat?  Do they eat a “low fat” diet?  No.  Bears eat tons of fatty salmon, squirrels and birds eat tons of fatty nuts and seeds.  Carnivores eat entire animals muscle meat, organs meat, fat and all.  Herbivores must eat constantly all day long because their source of nutrition contains very little protein, carbohydrate and fat.  Blades of grass have a bit of carbohydrates, protein and fat, but not much.  Giraffes sleep for only 4 hours a day.  They chew leaves most of the rest of the time.  Cows graze all day.  And while leaf eaters are grazing they are also consuming protein and fat dense insects which supply them with vital nutrients.  I know we don’t feed our kids insects, and they don’t have time to chew leaves all day, so we must provide other fat sources for their brain.

If nature isn’t low fat, why should your child be low fat?

Fat is protective in food scarce times.  most humans in developed countries don’t have to worry about food scarcity, so we have no need to carry excess weight from a survival perspective.  but our brains and bodies are evolved to need fat.  as a society we need to stop starving students’ brains of necessary fat.

We must feed them real fat from natural sources like butter, whole milk dairy, eggs, meat and unrefined olive or nut/seed oils. Not fat made in a factory, like refined vegetable oils.  These are so chemically changed from what nature provides us for nourishment that the body has to treat them as toxins that need to be eliminated.  Again you are feeding a child something that has no nourishing properties and requires their detoxification filters to work over-time to filter out.

Carbohydrates

We are also in a low carbohydrate craze in our society.  While it’s true that humans don’t need anywhere near the 8 daily servings of grains that the USDA makes us think we need, we also don’t need to cut out this vital source of energy from our diets.  the challenge becomes trying to find a “safe” carbohydrate.  One that your body can digest and use as energy to fuel the energy greedy brain.

We would never ask a highly trained athlete to step on to the field and perform without proper fuel for his body.  why then do we expect undernourished teachers to teach undernourished kids and send a large majority of the student population to trade school or college?

We don’t eat wheat the way our ancestors did.  They knew it had to be properly cultivated, harvested, stored, and prepared for it to both provide nutrition and in food scarce times like drought and winter nourish the population until crops were growing again.  They knew that if they didn’t sour it before eating it (sourdough bread) it would sicken the population.

That’s why so many people are now learning they are gluten intolerant.  Not because wheat itself is allergenic but because the way we grow and eat it does not provide it nutrients the body in such a way that the nutrients can be assimilated.  Instead we eat it and it is seen by the body as non-nutritive molecules and the body puts it through an already taxed detox filter.