NASHVILLE, Tenn. (Sept. 30, 2008)– You wouldn’t send your children to school with a lunchbox full of candy bars, but you might be packing almost as much sugar when you send them off with some popular lunchtime classics. Considering that most children brush their teeth in the morning and again before bed, the sugar they put in their mouths at lunch could lead to decay, worrying some dentists.

“Some lunch foods we might consider wholesome actually contain a shocking amount of sugar,” said Jed J. Jacobson, D.D.S., M.S., M.P.H., chief science officer at Delta Dental. “It’s really quite easy to pack a lunch that is better for your child’s teeth and their overall health as well.”

Take, for example, the classic peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Toss in a box of raisins, a small container of applesauce and a single-serve carton of chocolate milk. While it sounds healthy and balanced, the sugar total clocks in at a whopping 98 grams. An average candy bar contains about 25 grams of sugar.

To reduce sugar’s punch at lunchtime, look for natural peanut butter (made without added sugar) and low- or no-added sugar jelly. Replace the white bread with whole wheat bread, and the regular applesauce with natural applesauce. Consider skipping the raisins – in addition to their high sugar content, their stickiness can hold sugars against children’s teeth for prolonged periods. Swap the raisins for some mini carrots, and the chocolate milk for white milk, preferably low fat. The new total will be a more tooth-tolerable 31 grams of sugar.

For other alternatives, consider a tube of yogurt as a good option for boosting calcium with only 10 grams of sugar. Even better is a piece of string cheese, which also offers calcium but with zero grams of sugar. A fruit roll-up style snack has half the amount of sugar (7 grams) as fruit snacks in a pouch (14 grams). For a special treat, replace three chocolate, crème-filled cookies (at 13 grams of sugar) with three vanilla wafer cookies (4 grams of sugar).