As many of you may have heard, school lunch in the U.S. is undergoing some positive changes to improve the nutrition content of the foods and in turn improve the health and wellbeing of our kids. The USDA’s Health, Hunger-Free Kids Act is designed to improve 32 million school age children’s nutrition in the US. The main goal of this act is to provide healthy and wholesome meals that mimic the 2012 Dietary Guidelines for Americans. It’s important to serve our children healthy and nutritious foods as nutrition is directly related to learning and success in the classroom.
The main changes that are being implemented are increasing fruits and vegetables, decreasing total fat and saturated fat content by incorporating more lean meats and low fat milk products, reducing sodium content by 25-50%, incorporating more whole grains over the white, refined grains, and serving more appropriate portion sizes.
These new recommendations have come under scrutiny, however with all new processes, we need to be patient and give it some time to work! Overall, the improvements are going to improve the nutrition and health of our children which is very important. I have visited with Scott Wahl, Watertown Foodservice Director at our Coordinated School Health meetings and he is working hard to achieve these new recommendations. For those with school aged kids, take some time to examine the menu with your child and discuss the changes and why these improvements are needed!
For more information check out: http://www.eatright.org/kids/article.aspx?id=%206442471598.
-Kelsey
