REMEMBER the thrill of getting money for the canteen when you were at school? It was a morning spent in excited wonder — would you get the finger bun or the iced doughnut? Would you splurge your 30c on a Coke or an apple turnover?

The choice was as much of a treat as the break from vegemite sandwiches on standard white bread and a drink from a plastic bottle that never really lost the smell of the orange cordial it once contained.

It’s these kind of stories that will sound as far fetched to our kids as dipping a quill in an ink pot before writing sounds to us.

Today’s canteen menu bears no resemblance to the ones we remember. Gluten free, sugar free, lactose free, additive free options have brought it to a whole new level (and I’m not even talking about allergens which clearly shouldn’t be on any school menu).

The healthy eating message is becoming very much part of our children’s daily lives and while the physical benefits can’t be denied I’m not sure the overall emphasis on a healthy diet is really that healthy.

This is not about the supposed evils of sugar, the “irritable bowel” brought on by gluten or the “hyperactivity” caused by additives but rather the unhealthy obsession with eating healthy food — a term now known as orthorexia.

Steven Bratman, an American physician who first introduced the term orthorexia in 1997, says “for people with orthorexia, eating healthily has become an extreme, obsessive, psychologically limiting and sometimes physically dangerous disorder, related to but quite distinct from anorexia”.

Of course we need to teach our children about nutrition and how what they eat affects their health. They need to learn to make good choices and, from an educational standpoint, they need to learn about food and how the body works.

We even learned about good nutrition back in the ‘80s although I think the lesson went something like: eat meat and three vegetables, lots of different colours and don’t forget to eat fruit. The end.

But my son and his cohort are learning more than that, they are learning that sugar is evil, that gluten-free is better and that additives are the enemy. They learn about it in class, from their teachers, their peers, and it is plastered all over the media. The kids on the playground talk so much about That Sugar Film it could be their school set work.

They are inundated with messages about sugar, about organic choices and paleo menus. Their spaghetti is made out of zucchini, their rice is actually cauliflower and chocolate mousse is made out of avocado. For the record none of this type of stuff is happening in my home — I sometimes feel like I am single-handedly supporting the carb industry.

There is a very strong message that some foods are bad and bad foods lead to fear of eating them.

Right now I know too many young teens refusing to eat sugar in any form, they are obsessed with the content of their foods and while they may look clear skinned and healthy on the outside (for now), their minds are dangerously focused on food.

There is a lot of attention on diet and food at the same time as their bodies are changing and their body image is forming. Are we teaching them to be healthy or are we leading them to orthorexia?

We have come so far. We’ve realised the danger of the media showing only one body type, advertisers have finally woken to the idea that not all women look a certain way and even Barbie is getting real, but here we are teaching our children that food can be the enemy.

We aren’t really making any progress if we shift the focus away from the skinny model to the evil food.

Everything in moderation, although until now I had never thought of that in terms of education.

Lana Hirschowitz is a blogger, writer and reforming finger bun lover. You can follow her on Facebook.