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By: Lisa Wuertz/MÁS staff

Description: Back to school means back to health, if parents pack nutritious meals

With kids going back to school, it’s no secret that childhood obesity is an epidemic.
Local strength and conditioning specialist, Aaron Gillies, shared some tips for packing a healthy lunch for school.

Ever wondered how many calories your child should be getting in their daily diet?

Between 1400 and 1800 is where most kids ages 5 to 12 should be, Gillies said.

When you break it down, those calories should be spread out over four or five meals a day at 300 to 400 calories per meal, according to Gillies.

“Give the kids snacks to eat between breakfast and lunch and between lunch and dinner. Granola bars work well, but check the ingredients list,” he said. “This is the most important thing parents can do. If it has high fructose corn syrup (HFCS), don’t buy it. A few years of consistent, high fructose corn syrup will turn a kid into a diabetic.”

Gillies also warns parents to stay away from white bread.

“It is very refined and easily broken down, giving kids a negative insulin reaction similar to HFCS,” he said.

To make sure food stays well preserved, Gillies recommends getting a cold pack for their lunch and using Tupperware.

“Just don’t heat things up in Tupperware — food leeches plastic and kids/parents end up ingesting plastic,” he said.

Here are some smart (and healthy) school lunch tips that Gillies shared with MÁS:

Things to pack:
• Any kind of tree nut is going to be good (unless you have a nut allergy, of course). Most parents say they are fattening, but they have unsaturated (good) fats.

• Sunflower seeds

• Mix half a handful of M&M’s into a mixture of peanuts, cashews, almonds and banana chips, and you’ve got one awesome snack.

• People need to get back to eating fruit! Whatever happened to a good ol’ apple, orange or a peach? A large raw apple has roughly 100 calories.

• Granola bars, but make sure they don’t have high fructose corn syrup.

• Sunchips, just cut down on the portion size.

• Homemade oatmeal cookies are awesome.

• Milk, 2 percent is OK. Do not get Vitamin D fortified. It just means it is loaded with synthetic vitamin D, and children can get that from other places. Organic is the best.

• Yogurt, but check the label and look for HFCS.

• For drinks, stick to water for the most part. Anything else will have sugar in it. Sugar is an easy way to get kids to drink anything.

• Veggies, the more colorful the array, the better. Want kids to eat asparagus? Try baking raw asparagus in a little olive oil with ground pepper on it. Just don’t turn it to mush.

• Whole grain bread for sandwiches.

Things to stay away from:
• Sugar

• Snickerdoodles and other store-bought cookies. Most are loaded with lard and other fat to keep them together.

• Fruit juice — it has the sweet poison, HFCS.

• White bread

• Anything that has HFCS in it.