Today's parents have access to more health information than ever before and generally know more about nutrition than their parents did. But we keep hearing about how kids are getting heavier. A recent National Geographic issue on obesity revealed that, shockingly, today's children are the first to have a life expectancy shorter than their parents'. What gives?

It doesn't seem like mom and pop are putting junk on the dinner table. After 15 years of working in the public school system, I suspect that the culprit is what youngsters are indulging in outside the home and in between home meals, including what is lovingly tucked into their paper bags before they are kissed on the cheeks and sent off to meet the yellow bus.

We've all heard about the evil machines that exchange coins for junk food in the halls of our public learning institutions. This is not my concern. The kids know they are buying garbage. My problem is with the health food. Let me explain. I don't hassle students for munching sunflower sprouts. What I mean is what we might call "nominal health food": the instant noodles, granola bars, fruit leather, juice boxes, and yogurt tubes that are marketed as wholesome.

As a parent who hates packing his own lunch, never mind his kids', I can see the temptation of buying a bunch of flats of this stuff from a big-box store so that the kids can just toss what they want to into their backpacks before rushing out the door. Hey, it says it's healthy.

Barb Seed, a community nutritionist and registered dietitian who has been involved in studying and guiding food policy, corroborates these observations: single-serving, highly processed groceries, she says, have seen a steady rise in recent years. Individually, these items, with their claims of "no MSG" and "vitamin C added" look good; problems arise when you start adding up the sugar, fat, and salt from several packages, which few bother to do.

Seed recommends no more than one packaged item in each lunch bag. "If the amount of processed food gets over 50 percent, that's a problem," she states. Tossing a granola bar into a bag with a sandwich and some fresh fruit and vegetables is "fine for a treat", she says, "but don't think that you are giving your kid something healthy".

Susan Firus, a dietitian with the Vancouver Coastal Health Authority, recognizes what busy parents face, and the need for kids to make choices about what they like to eat, especially around their peers. She recommends avoiding the instant noodles, which nutritionally couldn't punch their way out of a bag of chips, in favour of low-fat versions of instant soups that contain dried vegetables and legumes. She said that although some vitamins are lost in processing instant soups, all of the minerals and protein are stable, making them a good choice. Don't be fooled by "beef flavour": let your child choose from such flavours as vegetables with couscous or spicy black bean.

Both dietitians agree that fruit leathers, such as Sun-Rype's Fruit-to-Go, and Fruit and Veggie, which have no added sugar, are great for both nutrition and convenience, but warn that parents should not rely too heavily on them. Firus comments that the bulk of anyone's servings of fruits and vegetables should come from fresh produce. Letting your children choose how you stock the fruit bowl leads to a more rapid depletion of its contents, while keeping a bag of peeled baby carrots and a tub of sliced cucumber and red-pepper strips in the fridge makes it easy for them to load up their own baggies.

Seed emphasizes that there is a range of opinions among professionals regarding all these processed products. I see this with yogurt tubes, which Firus says "are great" and which Seed looks at critically, noting that a Yoplait tube delivers only six percent of a child's daily needs for calcium. She calls that "pretty insignificant". Seed advises finding a low-fat yogurt that your kids like, as a 175-gram tub can hoist the calcium figure up to 30 percent.

Sorting through this, it becomes apparent that there is no magic here, nothing that all kids love that will meet all of their needs. The trick, as a parent, is to use common sense to see beyond the hocus-pocus and marketing sleight of hand.