Today on the Ask Prof Noakes Podcast we chat to Prof. Noakes about the LCHF Diet and what you should be putting in your kid’s lunch boxes. If your child is constantly hungry should you include more carbohydrates?

We answer Janet’s question today about whether or not you should include more carbohydrate in children’s lunch boxes (as opposed to what we would eat ourselves)?

Janet’s question read as follows: ‘I have a pre-teen son and he just doesn’t seem to stop eating and I’m wondering if you can advise in this regard. His weight is perfect, and he is quite a busy sporty child. What sort of food should he be eating?’

Prof Tim Noakes: I think that if they are continually hungry, it is because they are getting too little protein and fat in their diet. I would suspect that’s a high carbohydrate diet.

We find that with most of the children we deal with, if we can get them to eat a high fat-high protein breakfast so that they really eat a lot, they generally don’t get hungry until 2 or 3 o clock in the afternoon.
My point would be then to increase the fat and protein in the diet and eat eggs for breakfast. If you are eating muesli or porridge or oats for breakfast – that’s not going to sustain most people for 3 or 4 hours. After 4 hours they will be hungry again, and then what do they eat? They eat what you eat when you are away from home – processed foods, they don’t eat real foods. They go to their lunch boxes and find lots more carbohydrates.

Lowering Lunch Box Carbs on the LCHF Diet

If they were to see protein and fat in their lunch box then in my opinion they would be less hungry. We have had some lovely stories from mothers who say their children are completely changed. That when they came home they were completely famished and they couldn’t concentrate at school, and when they were eating the carbs at lunch break they would be completely uncontrollable afterwards.

But once they got onto this diet and took away their hunger they were able to concentrate much better at school and their performances went up. Many dramatic changes, so again I think it is a question of how much carbohydrate is in the diet.

Reduce the carbohydrate, increase the fat and protein and you should see the children become less hungry. If they don’t become less hungry it’s because you are still not feeding them enough. You must get more protein and fat.