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IOM Releases Nutrition Recommendations for School Meals
The current nutrition standards for school meals are in sore need of an overhaul. They haven’t been updated since 1995, and they’re not in line with the most recent Dietary Guidelines for Americans. The USDA tried for several years to bring the regulations up to date, but after running into problems —either technical, or political, or both — the department outsourced the task to the Institute of Medicine last year.
The IOM released its recommendations yesterday, and there’s some good news and some bad news.
Here’s the good news: If the USDA follows the IOM recommendations, school meal regulations may soon set limits on calories and sodium, require more whole grains and vegetables, and outlaw whole milk.
Here’s the bad news: the changes may increase costs for cafeterias by up to 25 percent for breakfasts, and up to 9 percent for lunches. Unless Congress increases the reimbursement rate for school meals, most cafeterias won’t have the money to meet the new guidelines.
The IOM proposed sweeping changes to the school meal nutrition standards. First, the committee recommended a food-based menu planning system that includes limits on calories, fat, saturated fat and sodium. Currently, schools have the option of using a nutrient-based system, which makes it easy to serve heavily processed, fortified food. They can meet requirements for vitamin C, for example, by serving fortified fruit snacks. Under a food-based system, nutrient targets are used in developing the standards for school meals, but they are not used in the actual menu planning. Instead, schools must simply serve items from a number of different food groups, including dark green and orange vegetables and legumes.
In addition to proposing a food-based meal pattern, the IOM recommended the following changes:
- School lunches should have a maximum calorie level (current regulations only set a minimum)
- The new regulations should place limits on sodium (currently there are none)
- Fruits and vegetables should no longer be interchangeable (currently, schools can serve either a fruit or a vegetable for lunch)
- Students should be required to select either a fruit or a vegetable for their lunch to be reimbursable (currently they must take three of the five offerings, and most take the milk, the meat and the bread)
- Over the course of a week, schools should serve 1/2 cup each of dark green vegetables, orange vegetables and legumes
- Half of the grains served each week should be whole grains
- Schools should offer only fat-free and low-fat milk
- Labeling on any packaged food product should indicate 0 grams of trans fat
These standards are based on solid science and, if implemented, they would go a long way toward improving the nutritional quality of school meals. Now it’s up to the USDA to include them in the new school meal regulations. In the coming months, the department will review the proposed standards and adjust them to make sure they remain within cost limits. Margo Wootan, the director of nutrition policy for the Center for Science in the Public Interest, put it this way: “Both cost and science will drive the standards, and cost will be the bigger one.”
The science is here — now, this is simply a question of priorities. If Congress is truly committed to providing schoolchildren with nutritious breakfasts and lunches, lawmakers are going to have to raise the reimbursement rate for school meals. Hopefully the IOM’s report will persuade them to do so.
October 20th, 2009 at 11:22 am
Outlaw whole milk? That’s absurd. Whole milk is incredibly healthy (as long as it’s coming from healthy cows). Fat is an essential macronutrient. What they should be cutting back on is the ridiculously high amount of carbohydrates in school meals. Why not outlaw French fries? Or white rice? Or white bread?
October 22nd, 2009 at 4:43 am
The IOM is a great science based report. It’s giving good advice on how to move a school lunch program that was created to aid the problems of an under nourished population in the 40’s, and move it towards the health needs of today, which is more about reducing chronic disease, diabetes and obesity. I hope USDA implements this report and hope congress will better fund school lunch programs when the reauthorize the act next year.
http://healthyschoolscampaign.org/?iom
October 28th, 2009 at 9:04 am
It all comes down to dollars and sense! We all know more fruits and veggies are a good idea. However, with current food prices already very high and with labor costs through the roof there are few NSLP operators that can absorb any increase in food cost or the labor needed to properly prepare the product. Congress must come through with additional funding for schools to continue to provide good (but why not GREAT) meals to the leaders of tomorrow!
October 29th, 2009 at 6:54 pm
Yeah, the ban on whole milk seems off-base. I’d far rather see a kid getting an extra 50 calories from plain whole milk, not from the high-fructose corn syrup added to low-fat chocolate milk. The chocolate milk served in schools has more calories and more sugar than a can of soda.
I like the food-based planning system. An orange and a bag of fortified fruit-flavored gummies may contain the same amount of vitamin C, but you can’t escape a fruit requirement by offering fortified fruit-flavored gummies. I only wish the food-based requirements were stricter.
The only carb-related recommendation is that half of all grain servings be “whole grain-rich.” Not 100% whole grain — just whole grain-rich. A “whole grain-rich” item can contain up to 85% refined flour and sugar and still meet the requirement.
The committee couldn’t place a specific limit on added sugars because nutrition labels on food don’t list them. However, the committee says that the calorie limits they placed do a good job of limiting added sugars. I’m not so sure this is true — there are four added teaspoons of sugar in the chocolate milk alone, and there is nothing to stop a school from counting a sugar cookie as a whole grain item as long as it contains 2 tsp of whole wheat flour. Or those syrup-soaked “french toast stix dippers” that so many schools serve at breakfast or lunch.
Schools are allowed to serve more than a quarter of their vegetable servings in the form of french fries and tater tots if they so choose. Or canned corn. This is in addition to the requirement for grain/bread.
October 29th, 2009 at 7:00 pm
Oh, and the report makes a lot of assumptions about the types of foods they believe schools will use to fill the requirements. They assume meats will be lean, cheese will be low-fat, fruits won’t be canned in heavy syrup, canned vegetables won’t contain added salt.
Yeah, right. Schools that rely on USDA commodity foods like beef and cheese — and many have to in order to get school lunch subsidies — have to accept full-fat cheeses and fatty cuts of beef. Right now 80-90% of schools fail the USDA recommendation on saturated fat content, in part because they’re accepting USDA commodity food.
The recommendations say nothing at all about restricting the use of processed foods, which most schools rely heavily upon, or fast foods like Domino’s Pizza and Taco Bell being served as entrees, which happens more than it should.
My hope is that the sodium recommendations eventually squeeze a lot of these foods out, but I’m not too optimistic.