The Smart Choices Program for Tuck Shops is a Joke and Making our Children Sick!

Several weeks ago a very enthusiastic Monica Topliss from the Sunshine Coast e-mailed me to tell me that she had produced the most wonderful healthy snack food for children called Frogseye Jelly.  She was so very proud and excited about the product as it was made with real food; sago, real fresh fruit 35%, sugar, citric acid, guar gum and tumeric.  Considering many other snack targeted to children have colours, flavourings, artificial sweeteners and a bunch of other additives and flavourings I considered this a wonderful convenient treat snack.   Sago is an ingredient that I use a lot because it has a vitamin that is not available in many foods - B 17 as well as many other nutrients.

Monica sent me some samples and my teenage children had them devoured in a very short period of time, I managed to get a taste out of each of them but I was only allowed what I could scrape from the kids. 

I e-mailed Monica back telling her they were a success and that she should be very proud of her product and I felt that she would do well considering the food for commercial purposes was one of the best I’d seen in a long time.

She contacted the Smart Choices Program for them to asses her Frogseyes Jelly.  Smart Choices -  (Healthy Food and Drink Supply Strategy for Queensland Schools) is the government body which gives food for tuck shops a rating.  This rating is based on the traffic light system, where a food is either given a green light (have plenty of these foods in the tuck shop), a gold light (have these foods in the tuck shop but they should not be served up every day) and a red light (better off not having these in the tuck shop).

Smart Choices, which became mandatory in state schools from 1 January 2007, applies to all situations where food and drink is supplied in the school environment including tuckshops, vending machines, school excursions, school camps, fundraising, classroom rewards, school events such as celebrations and sports days, and food used in curriculum activities.

The Smart Choices Program gave Frogseyes Jelly a red light.  I had mentioned to Monica that the smart choices program does not care about the ingredients, they just want to make sure that the nutritional requirements of the food are perfect or good.  In other words as long as the sugar and fat and salt content are low then the food is deemed to be a food to serve up to children. 

So while Monica’s wonderful real food snack was given the red light the following food was given the gold light.  Ingham Chicken Nuggets; [Chicken (44%), Flour (Wheat, Maize & Soy), water, hydrogenated vegetable oil, starch, yeast, soy protein concentrate, flavour (Milk), Salt, 500, 450, 451, 341, Milk solids, Emulsifier 472e, thickeners (401, 412, 466, 415), egg white powder, gelling agents (508, 407), ground extracted spices, natural colour 100, Antioxidants(319, 306), vitamin (Thiamine)].

Remember when I talked about what is behind flavour, well just in case you have forgotten here are the 48 chemicals behind the word flavour (natural and artificial); amyl acetate, amyl butyrate, amyl valerate, anethol, anisyl formate, benzyl acetate, benzyl isobutyrate, butyric acid, cinnamyl isobutyrate, cinnamyl valerate, cognac essential oil, diacetyl, dipropyl ketone, ethyl acetate, ethyl amyl ketone, ethyl butyrate, ethyl cinnamate, ethyl heptanoate, ethyle heptylate, ethyl lactate, ethyl methylphenylglycidate, ethyl nitrate, ethyl propionate, ethyl valerate, heliotropin, hydroyphrenyl-2-butanone (10 percent solution in alcohol) alpha ionone, isobutyl anthranilate, isobutyl butyrate, lemon essential oil, maltol, 4-methylacetophenone, methyle anthranilate, methyl benzoate, methyl cinnamate, methyl heptine carbonate, methyl naphthyl ketone, methyl salicylate, mint essential oil, neroli essential oil, nerolin, neryl isobutyrate, orris butter, phenethyl alcohol, rose, rum ether, ϒ-undecalactone, vanillin and solvent. 

And here are the ingredients behind the word “natural” colour; uncoppered chlorophyll (E140), curcumin (E100), sorbitol (E420), polysorbate 80 (E433) propylene glycol,(1520) alpha-tocopherols (E307), water.  Just so you know that this is what is in Julie Eady’s Additive Alert (now stocked in my online store) about these additives in natural colour.
E100 - damages animal genes, possible risk to conception and cancer
E420 - not suitable for diabetics, infants and young children, may cause liver toxicity, gastrointestinal upsets, prohibited in foods for infants and young children
E433 - suspected carcinogen,
E1520 - causes liver and kidney damage, depresses the CNS, teratogen, on the NIH hazards list. 

At this point I hope your mouths are wide open and you realise the ludicracy of this whole program.  That they would red light a food with natural foods in it because it had too much sugar (9%) and allow a food full of chemicals to lace our children with poison.

I called the Smart Choices Program to talk to them about this but I may as well been yelling at a rock!  They kept repeating that the program was designed around some health guidelines.  I kept saying why don’t you look at the ingredients and the same answer came back. 

This is an outrage and the only way this will change in my opinion is for parents at schools to start making a noise.  I will be speaking at the Matthew Flinders Anglican College Fund Raiser on the 22nd February 2009 and at that talk I will be making a noise to hopefully wake the school, the administration and the tuck shop up to what they are feeding our children.

The Smart Choices Program were very proud of the fact that in Queensland we had a drop of 4% in the obesity rate of children since the conception and mandatory implication of the Smart Choices program on January 1st 2007, but they had no drop in ADD and ADHD, Autism, Allergies, Asperges, learning deficits etc.  Obesity is a problem but so are all the other health parameters that plague the children of this decade