What's for Lunch: Hot Dog & Starch

The only thing in this meal not loaded with starch or actual sugar is the hot dog. Potatoes actually count as a vegetable. The corn has almost as much starch. Then there's the bun.

The 8-ounce serving of chocolate milk contains 26 grams of sugar--half of which occurs naturally as lactose--the same as Classic Coke. And there's more sugar in the ketchup.

But then any kind of potato and corn are among the things kids most like to eat at school.

The hot dog, from a company called West Creek, is all beef and contains 500 milligrams of sodium. That's 21 percent of the total recommended daily allowance of sodium for a diet of 2,000 calories. But children require far fewer calories than that.