The types and amount of food that lunch boxes of school students in Dubai should contain will soon depend on the new guidelines to be issued by the authorities to promote healthy eating habits.
Dubai Municipality’s Food Control Department in collaboration with the Dubai Health Authority has come up with instructions for preparing school meals for children according to their age groups, in the form of an illustrative poster.
“The new poster titled ‘School Lunch Kit’ includes information on healthy food habits to be maintained when preparing lunch kits for children in all phases of schooling,” the municipality said on Thursday.
According to the poster to be distributed in schools soon, five types of foods, namely fruits, vegetable, milk, proteins, and grains should be included in the kit. Ideal food composition with regards to children’s age also has been explained in the poster.
School canteens have also been ordered not to sell soft drinks, energy drinks, fruit syrups, milk and yogurt with artificial flavours, lollipops and chewing gums, confectionaries with sugar and artificial colour, chocolates, food with sodium glutamate content, high fat foods and chips. A list of food items to be ideally made available in canteens has also been mentioned in the poster, which, an official said, is currently available only in Arabic.
The Municipality said it had started various awareness programmes including lectures and workshops in this regard. —firstname.lastname@example.org