Aligning School Nutrition Standards with current dietary guidelines could improve students’ health

Aligning the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s School Nutrition Standards with the current Dietary Guidelines for Americans (DGA) would benefit students’ health, a new report from the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy at Tufts University suggests. 

The report’s authors created a simulation model to analyze how introducing three different changes from the 2020-2025 DGA into the School Nutrition Standards, which guide the production of school meals, would affect students’ well-being. (The DGA is produced jointly by the USDA and the Department of Health and Human Services and is updated every five years.)

Those three changes included requiring all grain foods to be whole grain; lowering sodium content to 1,500 mg per day for ages 4 through 8, 1,800 mg daily for ages 9 through 13, and 2,300 mg per day for all other age groups; as well as limiting the percent of energy from added sugars to less than 10% of the total energy per meal.

The report hypothesized that 35% of these dietary changes would continue into adulthood. 

While the study's findings are based on a mathematical model and cannot be fully proven, its authors estimated that implementing these changes could prevent more than 10,600 deaths a year and would save over $19 billion annually in healthcare-related costs during later adulthood.

“On average, school meals are healthier than the food American children consume from any other source including at home, but we’re at a critical time to further strengthen their nutrition,” senior author Dariush Mozaffarian, a cardiologist and Jean Mayer Professor of Nutrition at the Friedman School, said in a statement. “Our findings suggest a real positive impact on long-term health and healthcare costs with even modest updates to the current school meal nutrition standards.”

The model also estimated that the changes would reduce elementary and middle school students’ body mass index (BMI) by 0.14 and systolic blood pressure by 0.13 mm Hg. The benefits to high school students were about halved due to older students typically eating fewer meals at school, the report stated. 

Earlier this year, the USDA released its proposed updates to the School Nutrition Standards, which would limit added sugars in school meals for the first time and place further restrictions on sodium. 

The proposed updates have been met with scrutiny by school nutrition professionals, many of whom worry that the changes will make it even harder for them to feed kids and will turn manufacturers away from producing K-12 products.