A study of daycare lunches reveals that parents should take more care when packing their kids' meals.

RODALE NEWS, EMMAUS, PA—At the end of the last school year, a Chicago principal made headlines when she banned school lunches brought from home. While healthy-food advocates chastised the decision as a way to force kids to buy unhealthy school food, the principal may have been on to something, at least from a food safety perspective. Research from the University of Texas, Austin, published last week in the journal Pediatrics, found that more than 90 percent of food that parents packed for their kids' lunches wasn't kept at safe temperatures, and thus posed a high foodborne-illness risk to children.

THE DETAILS: The researchers focused their efforts on children ages 3 to 5 who attend day care on a regular basis, because they're at most risk for illness-causing bacteria and because these children often don't have the option of buying a lunch at the daycare center. Measuring the surface temperature of meats, vegetables, and dairy products found in 705 lunches revealed that out of 1,361 perishable food items, just 22, or 1.6 percent, were in a safe temperature range (defined as below 39.2ºF or above 140ºF). Ninety-seven percent of meats, 99 percent of dairy, and 99 percent of vegetables were not at safe temperatures.

The authors also found that refrigerators, ice packs, and thermal lunch bags didn't help. Ninety-one percent of the lunches were packed in thermally insulated bags, but the temperature measurements showed that the bags didn't maintain the proper temperature. Just 83 of the 705 lunches were kept in refrigerators at the daycare centers, and only four of the 458 items in those refrigerated lunches were cold enough. In lunches that contained at least one ice pack, just 14 out of 618 items were cold enough. Only 5 out of the 61 items packed in lunches with two to four ice packs were at a safe temperature.

WHAT IT MEANS: Make sure all that healthy school food you're sending from home doesn't wind up making your child sick! The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which monitors occurrence of foodborne illness in the country, doesn’t track the number of kids who get sick from home-brought lunches. But that doesn't mean kids don't get sick.

"Just from seeing some of the school lunches brought to my school, anecdotally, I will tell you, I can't believe this stuff's not being refrigerated," says Ann Cooper, the Renegade Lunch Lady, school chef, outspoken advocate for healthier school lunches, and director of food services for the Boulder Valley School District. "It's a reasonable thing to be worried about." Cooper says her major takeaway from this study is "buy school lunches." But that's not an option for kids in daycare centers, and she cautions parents not to use the results from this study to resort to highly processed, shelf-stable (and sugar-, fat-, and salt-laden) packaged Lunchable-type meals. "My real problem with this study is that it's going to be one more way to instill fear in parents and for big agribusinesses and food companies to push more processed foods onto kids," she says.