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Retired St. Ambrose Professor, Alan Sivell, reminisces about his own school days and the homemade sack lunch his mom used to make.

By LMQC Battle of the Bulge blogger, Alan Sivell

Summer is wonderful. It gets us out of our routines. But as any parent knows, it’s also nice when it’s time to head back to school and life can be somewhat routine again.

That routine, however, comes with the added task of making school lunches. It can be a chore. Not actually the preparing but choosing what to prepare. But when you do choose, choose wisely, as the old knight said to Indiana Jones.

Alan would often pack his lunch in a “Mystery Machine” which often turned out to be a much more apt description of his lunchbox than one might think.

What you put into those sack lunches, day after day, can have a cumulative effect on your children’s health that may not reveal itself until many years later, according to a new study out of Brazil that recently was presented at the Alzheimer’s Association International Conference.

In grade school and junior high, I was a sack lunch kid.

Until 8th grade, when the lunch bell rang, I would go to the cloakroom, or later, my locker, and retrieve the brown paper bag with my lunch in it.

What’s in the bag? It was anyone’s guess.

I never had to guess what was in that bag. When I opened it, I was going to find two bologna sandwiches with a slice of cheddar cheese, yellow mustard on buttered, white Arnold or Pepperidge Farms bread.

Mind you, even if I had an early lunch period, as I did in the lower grades, that sandwich had been sitting unrefrigerated for a good three hours or more. By the time I took my first bite, the sandwich had assumed room temperature and then some. Both the cheese and bologna were sweating.

It was my favorite sandwich. And still is. But last month, while on vacation, was the first time in 30 years I had eaten one.

By the time I got to high school, I had a paper route and finally had some money to buy school lunches. My mom was an excellent cook and baker. But still, perhaps I was the only kid in America who loved school lunches. Well, not the fish sticks they served on Fridays.

I just liked the food. And the desserts, especially the sheet cake. The creamed chicken over rice. The meatloaf and mashed potatoes. Even what they called the spaghetti. But it was so different from what my Italian-American mom served, I just considered it to be something else.

“It’s not spaghetti, but I like it,” I would say to others at the lunch table.

You are what you eat, whether you know it or not

I didn’t realize abandoning my mom’s sack lunches featuring processed cold cuts on white bread then was good for my brain now.

The Brazilian study shows that eating ultra-processed foods 20 per cent of a person’s daily intake can lead to a significant rate of cognitive decline later in life. Those popular, easy to prepare (as in none) prepackaged lunches are just one of the foods the researchers are talking about.

Other foods (too many to mention here) include lunchmeats, sodas, chips, frozen pizzas, white bread.

Americans don’t even come anywhere close to the 20 percent ceiling. The studies’ coauthor, Dr. Claudia Suemoto, an assistant professor of geriatrics at the University of São Paulo Medical School, says super processed foods make up nearly 57 percent of our diet.

It doesn’t take long to hit 20 percent of your daily diet. Say a typical 12 year old consumes 2,000 calories in a day. 20 percent would be 400 calories. A hamburger Happy Meal (even one with apples and skim milk) is 475 calories.

So when making those sack lunches, choose wisely. Whenever possible, choose your child’s future health over convenience.

By LMQC Battle of the Bulge blogger, Alan Sivell

Summer is wonderful. It gets us out of our routines. But as any parent knows, it’s also nice when it’s time to head back to school and life can be somewhat routine again.

That routine, however, comes with the added task of making school lunches. It can be a chore. Not actually the preparing but choosing what to prepare. But when you do choose, choose wisely, as the old knight said to Indiana Jones.

Alan would often pack his lunch in a “Mystery Machine” which often turned out to be a much more apt description of his lunchbox than one might think.

What you put into those sack lunches, day after day, can have a cumulative effect on your children’s health that may not reveal itself until many years later, according to a new study out of Brazil that recently was presented at the Alzheimer’s Association International Conference.

In grade school and junior high, I was a sack lunch kid.

Until 8th grade, when the lunch bell rang, I would go to the cloakroom, or later, my locker, and retrieve the brown paper bag with my lunch in it.

What’s in the bag? It was anyone’s guess.

I never had to guess what was in that bag. When I opened it, I was going to find two bologna sandwiches with a slice of cheddar cheese, yellow mustard on buttered, white Arnold or Pepperidge Farms bread.

Mind you, even if I had an early lunch period, as I did in the lower grades, that sandwich had been sitting unrefrigerated for a good three hours or more. By the time I took my first bite, the sandwich had assumed room temperature and then some. Both the cheese and bologna were sweating.

It was my favorite sandwich. And still is. But last month, while on vacation, was the first time in 30 years I had eaten one.

By the time I got to high school, I had a paper route and finally had some money to buy school lunches. My mom was an excellent cook and baker. But still, perhaps I was the only kid in America who loved school lunches. Well, not the fish sticks they served on Fridays.

I just liked the food. And the desserts, especially the sheet cake. The creamed chicken over rice. The meatloaf and mashed potatoes. Even what they called the spaghetti. But it was so different from what my Italian-American mom served, I just considered it to be something else.

“It’s not spaghetti, but I like it,” I would say to others at the lunch table.

You are what you eat, whether you know it or not

I didn’t realize abandoning my mom’s sack lunches featuring processed cold cuts on white bread then was good for my brain now.

The Brazilian study shows that eating ultra-processed foods 20 per cent of a person’s daily intake can lead to a significant rate of cognitive decline later in life. Those popular, easy to prepare (as in none) prepackaged lunches are just one of the foods the researchers are talking about.

Other foods (too many to mention here) include lunchmeats, sodas, chips, frozen pizzas, white bread.

Americans don’t even come anywhere close to the 20 percent ceiling. The studies’ coauthor, Dr. Claudia Suemoto, an assistant professor of geriatrics at the University of São Paulo Medical School, says super processed foods make up nearly 57 percent of our diet.

It doesn’t take long to hit 20 percent of your daily diet. Say a typical 12 year old consumes 2,000 calories in a day. 20 percent would be 400 calories. A hamburger Happy Meal (even one with apples and skim milk) is 475 calories.

So when making those sack lunches, choose wisely. Whenever possible, choose your child’s future health over convenience.

Alan Sivell

Alan Sivell

St. Ambrose Professor, Pizza-lover, Bulge Battler

Alan is a communications professor at St. Ambrose University and a former reporter for WQAD-TV who has exercised – and dieted – his entire life.