What Happened When San Francisco Changed Its Lunch Program Schools across the United States are being asked to consider whether they may be at least partly responsible for the current rise in childhood overweight and obesity, considering that children often eat two or more meals a day at school and schools are often the site of easily available soft drinks and non-nutritious snacks. Schools sometimes respond that children will not eat the fruits, whole grains, and vegetables that are considered more healthful, and they express concern that changing the options available at school will drastically reduce the number of youngsters who participate in school meals, thereby decreasing revenues from school food services, which are expected in most districts to be self-supporting. To try to find out what actually happened when one school district took giant steps to reform its nutrition programs, researchers examined in detail the experience of a middle school in San Francisco, California. As reported in the September 2006 issue of the American Journal of Public Health, California already had in place a Childhood Obesity Prevention Act that became law in 2003, requiring elementary and middle schools to remove access to all soft drinks during school hours. Local districts have the option to institute even more comprehensive policies, and San Francisco in the 2003-2004 school year did exactly that by developing district-wide nutrition policies that require:
Although the state law mandates that soft drinks not be sold in middle or elementary schools at any time, San Francisco extended the ban to include high schools. The San Francisco Unified School District’s Nutrition Committee, a group of parents, educators, and community members who were active in changing the SFUSD nutrition standards, had predicted that changing the items available in school snack bars or student stores would encourage more students to go through the school lunch lines. To test this thought, researchers looked at what happened in Aptos Middle School, the first school to implement the changes. In the 859-student, culturally diverse school (reported as being 21 percent African American, 35 percent Asian American, and 24 percent Latino), in the 2002-2003 school year, sodas, Twinkies, Slim Jims, and giant pizzas were replaced with sushi, fresh soup, deli sandwiches, 100 percent fruit juice, and baked chicken with rice. Desserts included fruit cups and fresh fruit. Giant round pizzas were replaced with individual slices and a salad, and extra-large cheeseburgers were replaced by modest-sized hamburgers. The outcome: During the final full month of food sales before the changes went into effect, Aptos food service lost nearly $1,000. Two months later, in May 2003, Aptos made more than $2,000, with a particular boost in profits from sales of a la carte and snack bar items. The effects on student health will take longer to evaluate, but researchers note that the figures on participation indicate that students "will chose healthier options without detrimental effects on the economics of student meal services." Researchers who looked at the Aptos experiment, which has since been expanded to additional schools in the San Francisco Unified School District, note that an important element in student acceptance of the revised school menus was student input. At Aptos, students were polled on their food preferences, and their input, which included the addition of fresh deli sandwiches, pasta, and ethnic-specific foods such as sushi, was relayed to the Nutrition Committee and formed the basis for the new snack bar menus. The research report, "Healthier Choices and Increased Participation in a Middle School Lunch Program: Effects of Nutrition Policy Changes in San Francisco," is published in the September 2006 issue of the American Journal of Public Health. Request for reprints can be sent to mheyman@peds.ucsf.edu. See also: Are Your Kids Eating Healthy at School? Bottlers Agree to Limit Soft Drinks in Schools |
