School Lunches Offer Better Nutrition Than Packed Lunches

(Undated) -- School lunches often provide a better level of nutrition than packed lunches brought from home. That's according to researchers at Virginia Tech who based their study on National School Lunch Program nutritional standards adopted in 2012. While they found school lunches were deficient in iron content, the packed lunches had higher-than-recommended levels of fat and saturated fat. One reason may be that NSLP standards call for more fruits and veggies in school lunches, while packed lunches often contain higher fat and sugar levels in the form of processed foods and sweetened drinks.