If one meal is half of your calories, I hope your highest carb intake is at breakfast... I can't imagine what your blood sugar levels look like at 2pm if you have one giant meal once a day (unless you're specifically eating low-GI foods). Diabetes onset later in life can be related to these things.
This is also why I don't find a healthy lunch to contribute to greater overall health: people are different, and they usually need custom diet plans. Granted, lunch for everyone will impact the greatest number of people, but also in the smallest way. I submit that removing free sodas and adding tastier low-cal or zero-cal drinks would have an even greater effect on overall health than a free lunch, no matter how healthy the lunch is.
What we're talking about is trying to use convenience to covertly get people to be healthier, and that's really hard. If you really optimized you could make it so people biked or walked to work [vouchers on housing closer to work], place resources farther in the office so people have to walk around more often, a rewards system for taking breaks and walking around outside the campus [trackable by gadgets; also helps with vitamin d deficiency], allow people to bring home a healthy dinner, build a gym+shower into the property, and a rewards system for getting more sleep and regular exercise [trackable by gadgets]. The rewards could be tuned to the user's personal motivators.
That's all if you want to improve everyone's health. On the other hand, if you want people to think their job is cool because they get free lunch, you don't need to do those things.
This is also why I don't find a healthy lunch to contribute to greater overall health: people are different, and they usually need custom diet plans. Granted, lunch for everyone will impact the greatest number of people, but also in the smallest way. I submit that removing free sodas and adding tastier low-cal or zero-cal drinks would have an even greater effect on overall health than a free lunch, no matter how healthy the lunch is.
What we're talking about is trying to use convenience to covertly get people to be healthier, and that's really hard. If you really optimized you could make it so people biked or walked to work [vouchers on housing closer to work], place resources farther in the office so people have to walk around more often, a rewards system for taking breaks and walking around outside the campus [trackable by gadgets; also helps with vitamin d deficiency], allow people to bring home a healthy dinner, build a gym+shower into the property, and a rewards system for getting more sleep and regular exercise [trackable by gadgets]. The rewards could be tuned to the user's personal motivators.
That's all if you want to improve everyone's health. On the other hand, if you want people to think their job is cool because they get free lunch, you don't need to do those things.