USDA study: Healthier school meals linked to better daily diets

At a Monday Annual Meeting session on “Creating Healthier School Meals: Key Findings from USDA’s School Nutrition and Meal Cost Study,” presenters offered findings from two longstanding research efforts distilled into one big study.

The end result is the first nationally representative study of school meal programs since Obama-era federal school nutrition standards went into effect. It’s also the first national study to examine the nutritional quality and costs of school meals simultaneously.

The study collected data from 1,207 schools across the country in school year 2014-2015, with a goal of providing child nutrition professionals and school health advocates with critical information they can use to improve the nutritional health of the nation’s children. Speaking on the findings, session moderator John Endahl, with the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Food and Nutrition Service, said “the successes are encouraging.”

“The National School Lunch Program and School Breakfast Program meals are of high nutritional quality and consistent with the new standards, and they don’t cost more than meals of lesser nutritional quality,” he said. “There are higher rates of school meal participation in schools with lunches of higher nutritional quality, and their consumption is associated with higher quality daily diet.”

Still, challenges remain and not every school studied complied with new nutrition standards, reported Elizabeth Gearan, with Mathematica Policy Research in Cambridge, Massachusetts. For example, Gearan said school officials tasked with implementing the new nutrition standards have tapped a number of barriers and concerns, including the cost and availability of certain foods, training staff on the new nutrition standards, and tailoring the meals to both meet the standards and serve the varying needs of different age groups.

Christopher Logan, with Abt Associates Inc., also in Cambridge, Masschusetts, reported that three out of five school food administrators spent more on lunch than they received from USDA subsidies for free meals and “with meal quality increases have come cost increases.”

In addition, the study showed a relatively high level of “plate waste” — or food taken by a student but then thrown away — for certain foods, such as milk, vegetables and fruit. As Lauren Olsho, of Abt Associates Inc., told session attendees: “The most nutritious foods are the ones most often wasted.” She added that offer-vs-serve policies, which encourage student choice, can help reduce waste.

Students who participated in school meal programs had higher nutritional intake than non-participants, researchers reported. Such students were also less likely than non-participants to eat deserts, snacks and sugary beverages and more likely to have better nutrition overall.

“And there is a positive and significant association between nutritional quality and participation,” said presenter Mary Kay Fox, with Mathematica Policy Research. The study found that schools with the most nutritious food had about a 60 percent participation rate — that’s 10 percent higher than in schools with lower quality nutrition scores.

Endahl said the School Nutrition and Meal Cost Study findings will soon be formally released in four volumes.

“Given the magnitude of the study, the stand-alone summary findings will be hundreds of pages long,” he told attendees. “The study will be thousands of pages. It’s a wealth of information — anything you ever wanted to know about school meals!”

In the meantime, find more information at www.fns.usda.gov/research-and-analysis.