Call for healthier dinners on menu.

Byline: By Graeme Whitfield

School dinners should provide children with about a third of their weekly intake of fibre and protein, a report said yesterday.

Youngsters should also receive at least 40% of their recommended intake of iron, zinc, calcium, vitamin A and C and folate from meals in school, according to the report from Nutrient-based Standards for School Food.

The guidelines were announced yesterday by the National Heart Forum and the Caroline Walker Trust, as the Government continued to step up efforts to improve food in schools, including a pounds 280m cash boost.

It came after a high-profile campaign led by celebrity chef Jamie Oliver, who called for healthier and more nutritious school dinners.

The two health charities called for the Government to make their nutrient-based standards the basis for new statutory requirements in all schools in England and Wales.

While welcoming recent efforts to improve school meals, they said there remained a need for clear, independent advice on food in schools and good nutrient and food-based standards.

Their standards recommend that school meals contain at least two portions of fruit and vegetables.

Oily fish should be on the menu at least once a week, while fried or processed potato products should not be served more than once a week.

Fibre and protein intake from school meals should be at least 30%, the experts said.

The standards also call for levels of fat, especially saturated fat, to be limited in meals.

Jane Landon, associate director of the National Heart Forum, said: "Jamie Oliver's campaign dramatically exposed the woeful inadequacy of current minimum standards for school food in England and Wales and triggered a welcome but long-overdue rethink about what we feed children in schools.

"If we seriously mean to tackle the crisis in children's eating and diet-related ill-health, nutritional standards for school food must be raised to a meaningful benchmark; one which is scientifically based on what we know about the nutritional needs of growing children.

"Parents, schools, caterers and the Government all recognise the problems. We believe these standards provide the proper tools to fix the problem. Anything less will be tinkering."

Joe Harvey, chairman of the Caroline Walker Trust, said: "For far too long we have worked on the objective of seeing how cheaply we could provide food in schools rather than setting the appropriate quality standards, costing them, and providing the funding accordingly.

"These new standards not only update the previous ones but add a strong dimension in terms of accompanying recommendations on policy and infrastructure."

The recommendations came as the British Medical Association warned that about one million children under the age of 16 in the UK were now obese.

Their report, Preventing Childhood Obesity, makes some radical recommendations on what changes need to be made to stop more youngsters becoming obese and suffering the associated ill health.

These included a ban on the advertising of junk food, including inappropriate sponsorship programmes, targeted at school children.

A Department for Education and Skills spokesman said: "We are delivering no less than a transformation in school meals, supported by tough minimum nutrition standards, pounds 235m new investment, and an independent School Food Trust.

"An expert School Meals Review Panel is currently developing the new minimum nutritional standards, and is already giving strong consideration to the introduction of nutrient-based standards, using the Caroline Walker Trust guidelines as a starting point.

"The new standards will be rolled out to schools for consultation this autumn and become mandatory from 2006."