Submit your question for Dr. Mary Mason

Dr. Mary Mason wants to hear from you. She's answers your health questions every Wednesday on News 4 at Noon. This week, she's answering questions on healthy school lunches.

Q: How important is a healthy lunch for a kid?

A: Lunch should cover 1/3 of your child’s daily vitamins, minerals and calorie requirements. And poor choices at lunch – such as vending machines and hamburgers and fries- can lead to kids becoming overweight.

Making a brown bag lunch can be a great time to enforce good nutrition and food choices with your child. A good place to start is MyPyramid.gov – this is a great tool that helps you build a diet with fruits, vegetables, whole grains, and fat-free or low-fat milk and milk products and lean meats and proteins- and the website has a section that let’s kids get involved in making good food choices.

Q: How do you pack a lunch for a picky eater?

A: Get your kid involved with the process starting with grocery shopping. When they pick, you find out what they like and don’t like and they are more prone to eat it. Start planning lunch when you are cooking dinner- and have the child help- throw an extra piece of chicken on to make into chicken salad, or cook extra pasta, vegetables, or boil eggs for tomorrow’s lunch. Have the child bring home what they don’t eat so you can get a feel for what is working and not working.

Q: How do you build a healthy sandwich?

A: Most brown bag lunches include a sandwich. That’s a good place to start. Start with bread that has “whole wheat” as the first ingredient. Also get creative – use a whole wheat bagel, pita, or tortilla. Leave off cheese unless it is low-fat or fat free – cheese is one of the leading sources of saturated fat in a kid’s diet. For fillings- look for low fat turkey, chicken, ham- even low fat bologna can be found. And slipping vegetables- slices of cucumber, tomato, spinach- into a sandwich is a good way to give that sandwich a healthy kick.

Q: What about dessert?

A: A small dessert is OK- it helps kids learn to balance between healthy choices and not-so- healthy choices. Low sugar/low fat puddings and Jell-O, trail mix, granola bars, yogurt, an oatmeal cookie are all good choices.

Q: Are juices boxes OK?

A: Juice has lots of sugar. If you must include juice, make sure you buy low sugar brands and say 100% juice. Encourage low-fat milk or water. One good trick is to freeze small bottles of water and wrap in a paper towel.  This will keep the lunch cold and the moist paper towel can help be used to clean up after lunch.

About Dr. Mary Mason:

Dr. Mason is board certified in Internal Medicine and is the Assistant Clinical Professor at Washington University School of Medicine. She went to medical school at Washington University, and did her Internal Medicine Residency and
was Chief Resident for Internal Medicine at Barnes-Jewish Hospital.  Dr. Mason teaches in the internal medicine residency clinic.