Schools making progress on new US nutrition standards: Vegetable consumption up 16 percent
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* Kim Krisberg

In the cafeterias of the Boulder Valley School District, chicken nuggets, tater tots and flavored milk are no longer standard fare. In fact, they have been completely scrapped from the menu.

Instead, students in the Colorado school district get to choose among items such as chicken potstickers, green chile and cheese tamales, organic pork ribs, sweet potato chips, veggie burgers, sweet and sour tofu and unlimited servings from the salad bar. In the district’s elementary and middle schools, a la carte items have been eliminated, with the exception of juice and soy milk.

![Figure1](http://www.thenationshealth.org/http://www.thenationshealth.org/content/nathealth/44/4/1.3/F1.medium.gif)

[Figure1](http://www.thenationshealth.org/content/44/4/1.3/F1)

Students at Yorkshire Elementary in Manassas, Va., enjoy their lunch in 2012. New nutrition standards adopted that year have led to increased fruit and vegetable consumption among kids.

Photo by Lance Cheung, courtesy USDA

“As far as I’m concerned, we’re in the business of feeding kids real, whole meals,” said Ann Cooper, CEC, director of food services for the Boulder Valley School District, which serves about 11,000 meals per day. “Food literacy needs to be seen in schools as just as important as academics.”

The menu changes in Boulder Valley began about five years ago, a few years before the U.S. Department of Agriculture issued its new nutrition standards for school meals. The jumpstart meant the school district was ahead of the game when it came to the workforce training, infrastructure and equipment changes necessary to meet the new standards. But the real game-changer was engaging students in the healthy transition. To do that, Cooper and her colleagues organize hundreds of events each school year, from taste testing to cooking competitions. And the efforts have paid off: Student participation in the school meal program is up 7 percent from last year, Cooper told *The Nation’s Health.*

“If you’re expecting kids in high school who spent 10 years thinking that chicken nuggets is a food group to all of a sudden embrace salad bars...it won’t happen without education and time,” she said. “We didn’t get to be a society of obese children overnight and we won’t turn it around overnight.”

Thanks to the new federal school meal nutrition standards, Boulder Valley is no longer the exception to the rule. With the start of the 2013-2014 school year, USDA reported that the vast majority of schools are successfully meeting new nutrition guidelines for school meals. While many schools had begun moving toward healthier fare on their own, the 2010 passage of the federal Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act set a course for the first national update of school meal standards in more than 15 years and authorized increased federal reimbursement to schools districts that comply with the new standards.

USDA’s new nutrition standards, which were released in 2012, call on schools to offer more fruits, vegetables and whole grains, to serve only fat-free and low-fat milk, eliminate trans fats, and place limits on calories and sodium. With more than 31 million children participating in the National School Lunch Program every school day and a childhood obesity rate that has nearly tripled in the last 40 years, health and nutrition advocates hailed the new standards. Today, nearly 90 percent of schools are meeting the new nutrition standards, and only 0.15 percent of schools have cited the nutrition standards as a reason they left the National School Lunch Program.

Still, many schools could meet the new meal standards more effectively and at less cost if they had updated equipment and infrastructure, said Jessica Donze Black, MPH, RD, director of the Kids’ Safe and Healthful Foods Project at the Pew Charitable Trusts during a March 20 USDA news conference. In surveying schools nationwide, Black and her colleagues found that 88 percent of school districts needed at least one piece of kitchen equipment and 55 percent needed kitchen infrastructure changes. For example, in Alabama, 40 percent of school districts said they needed walk-in freezers and 39 percent needed more electrical capacity.

However, many of the top equipment needs cost less than $2,000, “so this is a solvable problem,” Black said. During the news conference, USDA Secretary Tom Vilsack noted that the agency announced $11 million in school equipment grants in December and that President Barack Obama’s fiscal year 2015 budget proposal includes $35 million in school kitchen equipment grants.

“The federal grants are a really important piece of the puzzle,” Black told *The Nation’s Health.* “They can be catalytic.”

In response to concerns that the new standards may negatively impact participation in the school lunch program, Black said the answer is to “sell healthy foods that are appealing rather than selling less healthy foods.” Luckily, some early research is finding that kids are responding favorably to the changes. In a study published in March in the *American Journal of Preventive Medicine,* researchers found that the new federal standards have led to an increase in fruit and vegetable consumption. To conduct the study, researchers collected plate waste from more than 1,000 students in four schools before and after the new standards were implemented. The study found that fruit selection increased by 23 percent and vegetable consumption increased by more than 16 percent. Also of note, the study found that while students still threw away a substantial portion of their fruits and vegetables, the new nutrition standards did not result in more food waste than before.

Juliana Cohen, ScD, ScM, lead author of the study and a research fellow at the Harvard School of Public Health, said the findings point to the importance of involving students in creating healthier school meals.

“We are seeing high levels of food waste, but it’s not due to the new nutrition standards,” Cohen said. “That why it’s so important to focus on food quality and palatability.”

![Figure2](http://www.thenationshealth.org/http://www.thenationshealth.org/content/nathealth/44/4/1.3/F2.medium.gif)

[Figure2](http://www.thenationshealth.org/content/44/4/1.3/F2)

A worker prepares carrots and peas for students at Yorkshire Elementary in Manassas, Va. Almost 90 percent of U.S. schools are meeting new nutrition standards enacted by USDA.

Photo by Lance Cheung, courtesy USDA

Diane Pratt-Heavner, spokeswoman for the School Nutrition Association, called for continued flexibility on USDA’s part, such as the agency’s decision earlier this year to allow schools to serve larger portions of lean protein and whole grains than the standards originally intended. Such flexibility will help schools maintain student participation, she said. According to the Government Accountability Office, participation in the National School Lunch Program dropped by 1.2 million students between 2010-2011 and 2012-2013, primarily driven by a drop in students who pay full price.

“It’s not about scrapping the standards, it’s about providing flexibility,” Pratt-Heavner told *The Nation’s Health.* “As paying students leave, it threatens the overall stability of the program...We want the school meal program to foster a sense of community in the cafeteria, not stigmatize kids as a program that only serves poor children.”

APHA member Margo Wootan, DSc, director of nutrition policy at the Center for Science in the Public Interest, said declines in school meal participation are usually temporary. The answer, she said, is not to exempt struggling schools from the standards, but to provide them with the resources and mentoring to succeed. Wootan noted that schools may find it easier to offer healthier lunches in the fall when USDA’s nutrition standards for competitive and a la carte foods in school go into effect as well.

“Having consistently healthy standards across the whole campus makes school lunch much more appealing, competitive and financially more sound,” she said. “Overall, we’ve seen more improvement in nutrition quality in schools in the last two years than over the last decade and it’s very encouraging.”

Meeting nutrition standards and finding food kids will eat is often a delicate balance, said Kathy Glindmeier, MBA, RD, director of nutrition and wellness for Paradise Valley Unified School District in Phoenix. While state legislation passed in 2006 had already updated school nutrition standards for kindergarten through eighth grade, the USDA nutrition changes ushered in new meals in high school as well. Glindmeier said that even though the district faces challenges in implementing the new standards — such as finding healthy breakfast options that kids can quickly eat in the classroom in less than 10 minutes — kids seem to like the new foods and the district meal program is able to “sustain itself in the black.”

“They’re our customers and I don’t want to be guilty of having my students, whether free, reduced or paid, not eat lunch,” she said. “I have a responsibility to make sure they have enough nutrients in their bodies to learn.”

For more information on new school nutrition standards, visit [www.usda.gov](http://www.usda.gov) or [www.healthyschoolfoodsnow.org](http://www.healthyschoolfoodsnow.org).

## Food marketing, after-school programs targeted in new efforts

The U.S. Department of Agriculture proposed new guidelines in February for local school wellness policies, including ensuring that foods and beverages marketed to kids in schools are consistent with Smart Snacks in School standards, which set criteria for school vending machines and snack bars.

According to the Center for Science in the Public Interest, in 2012, 70 percent of elementary and middle school students and 90 percent of high school students attended schools with in-school food marketing, most of which advertised unhealthy options.

“The idea here is simple — our classrooms should be healthy places where kids aren’t bombarded with ads for junk food,” said first lady Michelle Obama in a USDA news release. “Because when parents are working hard to teach their kids healthy habits at home, their work shouldn’t be undone by unhealthy messages at school.”

Also in February, the Boys and Girls Clubs of America and the National Recreation and Park Association announced a five-year commitment to create healthy environments for children attending out-of-school programming. The organizations committed to providing 5 million children with healthy snacks and physical activity. When combined with a previous commitment from YMCA of the USA, more than 5.5 million children will reap the benefits of healthier after-school and out-of-school programming.

“Our pledge is to provide a world-class experience after school and in summer that assures success is within reach for every young person who enters our doors — and critical to that success is building healthy habits,” said Damon Williams, PhD, senior vice president for program, training and youth development services at Boys and Girls Clubs of America.

*   Copyright The Nation’s Health, American Public Health Association