Is Your School's Nut Policy Hurting You?

The inability to bring nuts to school can be difficult for those of us who want to instill the health benefits of nuts in our children. Nuts offer omega-3 fats and other healthy necessary fats in an unadulterated easy to digest form, many amino acids, the building blocks of protein, and powerful antioxidants, yet many of us can not bring them to school. In New York City public schools, there is not an anti-nut agenda and those with allergies are often offered merely a nut-free table or area. Have the private schools taken the nut-free thing too far by creating completely nut free schools?

The proteins I offer my children at lunch time are generally legumes. If they were home during the day they would usually have a smoothie with raw nuts in it, a handful of nuts or peanuts and sesame seed ridden crackers or snacks. Absent those options, at school, I am careful to focus on legumes, but as hard as I try, I find snack choices to be infuriating. They bring fruit, which alone may spike their blood sugar, but balanced by a small bag of nuts or sesame seeds, would not. They bring an occasional bar but it can not be a Lara bar (the only one I really approve of) because of the nuts.

Peanuts, truly a legume, offer a large dose of manganese, tryptophan, vitamin B-3, folate, copper and protein. One quarter cup of walnuts provide 95 percent of the RDA of omega-3 fatty acids and has been shown to decrease breast and prostate cancer risk. Walnuts have very distinctive phenols, flavonoids and other phytonutrients, some of which are not found in any other commonly eaten food. Black sesame seeds provide one third of the RDA for iron and calcium which is more readily absorbed than that in animal product equivalents. Yet, we can't bring these items to school at all, not even to public field trips where clearly previous visitors could have smeared peanut butter all over the table minutes before.

For kids who lean vegan or even mainstream kids who are not choosing the school's protein selection, does the nut ban unduly punish them without securing true safety for those with allergies? The alarming increase in nut allergies that came to be the rationale for the bans could be met with a softer still safe approach. New York City public schools do perfectly well, sometimes banning nuts from a specific classroom and sometimes offering a nut free table in the cafeteria and that is offered only at schools where requested by a parent of a student with a severe allergy. Hmm...

The nuts above, excluding Luke, are raw and sprouted, sweet tasting. The phytic acid is soaked out so there is no bitter taste at all and the germination process maintains the nuts' live enzymes.