Question: I am a school canteen convener. Can you suggest some good foods to be offered for children’s lunches?
School tuck shops should be carefully monitored by the parent committees that run them to ensure that the healthy food available is attractively presented to offer good competition to the professionally packaged alternatives. A few examples for canteens at school (or work) include:
— potatoes baked in their jackets, cut open and filled with cheese, tomato etc.
— hot rolls with chicken, tomato and pineapple
— attractively made salads with lean meat, cheese, fruit slices and raw vegetables on a paper plate and covered with cling-wrap
— hamburgers (no, they’re not all bad) made with cheese, lettuce, tomato and lean mince cooked on a very lightly greased hotplate.
Other simple snacks could include corn cobs, fresh fruit jaffles, soup, frozen bananas, raw carrots and milk shakes. These are fun foods for children that are also nutritious.
Teenagers who have money to spend on food will make their own choices, but these will often follow eating patterns established over the past decade or so. They can be taught that fried foods, tomato sauce, cream and sweets do not have to make up the major part of their diet.

Question: I have dry skin. Could it be caused by my diet?
The dryness of your skin is determined by the amount of oil produced by the sebaceous glands in the skin. People with dry skin either have fewer oil glands than other people, or their glands produce less oil. In the vast majority of cases, the tendency towards dry skin (or oily skin) is an inherited characteristic, and there is therefore nothing that you can do about it except use moisturizing creams.
In a small number of people, and if the skin dryness is a new phenomenon, there may be a skin disease present or some other internal problem (such as an under active thyroid gland), and a doctor’s opinion should be sought. Some people find that the oiliness of their skin changes at puberty, but this is a natural phenomenon.
The only connection between dry skin and diet could occur if you are lacking in vitamin A. This would be very rare in our well-fed society, as this vitamin is found in all fruit and vegetables, particularly those with an orange color (eg. carrots, pumpkins, mangoes). On the other hand, taking excess vitamin A in the form of pills or large amounts of orange colored food, can cause skin staining and other damage (eg. brain damage to the foetus in a pregnant woman). I suspect that you will merely have to blame your parents for your dry skin, and use moisturizing creams on a regular basis.