Lamb curry, mixed bean and root vegetable stew, lasagna, risotto . . . sound like the menu at one of your favorite restaurants?

Preschoolers in the UK will soon be eating lamb curry and beans, instead of chicken nuggets and fries, thanks to complaints from parents.

Guess again. These foods – along with more fruits, veggies and whole grains – will soon be on the plates of toddlers and preschoolers in private nurseries in the UK.

It seems parents of kids in private nurseries there are fed up with the standard, unhealthy chicken nugget and fries-type lunches – especially after learning that more than one in five kids under age 5 is overweight or obese. And that very young children are increasingly being diagnosed with type 2 diabetes.

So something called the School Food Trust has come up with new guidelines for healthier school lunches.

While our own government, under the FDA, is still pushing pizza as a vegetable, the British government is backing the new guidelines for healthier school lunches.

Kudos to the parents for speaking up .  . . and the government for listening.

The folks who make the unhealthy foods our kids eat want us to believe that kids don’t like healthy foods. They don’t taste good, kids won’t eat them.

Nonsense. According to a University of Oregon study, kids grow up liking what they develop a taste for very early in life. The researchers found that kids ages 3-5 already have developed a taste for sugary, fatty, and salty foods – and worse yet, they know the brand names of their favorite junk foods.

That’s no accident. Big Food spends millions on TV ads – for “foods” like sugar-coated cereals and soda. Impressionable young minds are bombarded with images of kids just like themselves, slurping down cocoa puffs and sugary, artificial fruit juices.

We ran our own taste test with kids – with the help of Kid Kritics© – and guess what? The kids all loved -our 100% organic spelt pasta.

The university researchers found that very young children, once exposed to foods with high sugar, fat and salt contents, develop a palate for those foods, which are usually higher in flavor than their healthier alternatives, but are also the foods most closely linked to childhood obesity.

Kids are highly impressionable. And one of the best ways to keep them healthy – and grow them into healthy adults – is to introduce them right from the start, to a variety of good, nutritious foods. But what happens when we send them off to school, where their choices are highly processed, salt and sugar-laden pizza, fries, and chicken nuggets?

Our government isn’t going to help us out on this – too many politicians out there who are beholden to lobbyists who insist that pizza is a vegetable. And cash-strapped schools are always looking for the cheapest answer.

It’s up to us to show our government and schools that kids will eat healthy foods if we offer them – and good health can happen on a budget. With so many reports of childhood obesity and diabetes, isn’t it time we started insisting on better school lunches?

Any parents out there who have tried to make a difference in school lunches? We’d love to hear from you!

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