When schools offer healthy snacks for lunch or in vending machines, children’s diets improve.
“When healthful food options are offered, students will select them, eat them, and improve their diet,” says Katherine Alaimo, associate professor of food science and human nutrition at Michigan State University.
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“Our study shows that schools can make the kinds of changes required by the forthcoming USDA guidelines, and these changes can have a positive impact on children’s nutrition.”
The US Department of Agriculture will ask schools to implement its “Smart Snacks” nutrition standards on July 1, 2014. The recommendations will set limits on calories, salt, sugar, and fat in foods and beverages, as well as promote snack foods with more whole grains, low-fat dairy, fruits and vegetables.
For the study published in Child Obesity, researchers tested standards similar to the USDA’s new requirements and demonstrated that Smart Snacks has the potential to improve students’ eating habits.
Schools can sway kids’ diets
For example, schools that started healthful snacks in lunchtime a la carte or vending programs boosted their students’ overall daily consumption of fruit by 26 percent, vegetables by 14 percent, and whole grains by 30 percent. Students also increased their consumption of fiber, calcium, and vitamins A and C.
Researchers also compared schools that adopted a variety of nutrition programs and policies. Some schools made only limited changes, while others implemented more comprehensive programs to assess and improve the school’s nutrition environment.
Changes schools made included raising nutrition standards for snacks and beverages, offering taste tests of healthful foods and beverages to students, marketing healthful foods in school, and removing advertisements of unhealthful foods.
When schools implemented three or more new nutrition practices or policies, students’ overall diets improved.
“Creating school environments where the healthy choice is the easy choice allows students to practice lessons learned in the classroom and form good habits at an early age, laying a foundation for a healthy future,” says Shannon Carney Oleksyk, contributing author and healthy living adviser for Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan.
Researchers say what made the study unique, in part, was that they measured students’ overall diets, not just what they ate in school.
The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s Healthy Eating Research program and Michigan State’s AgBioResearch supported the project.
Source: Michigan State University
