District pilots nutrition labels

RALEIGH, N.C.—A nutrition labeling pilot in eight Wake County Public School System’s schools found that the labels influenced students’ food selections.

The district’s School Health Advisory Council (SHAC), in collaboration with the child nutrition department, the PTA and other school administrators, conducted the pilot. The child nutrition department provided nutrition information, from which labels were made that were posted on serving line sneeze guards.

“We went through a lot of work to see how we wanted the labels to look,” Carol Mitchell, RD and chair of SHAC, said. “We decided we wanted to keep it simple, with no graphics. We didn’t want to fog up the issue.”

The labels were printed on bright yellow cards about the size of an index card. The labels listed the amount of calories and fat grams per serving.

“Traditionally, the nutrition information has been available on the child nutrition’s Web site,” Mitchell said. “Our goal [with the pilot] is to help students make informed choices right at the point of purchase, because if you are in the lunch line and the information is on the Web site that is not really very useful.”

Eight of the district’s 163 schools participated in the pilot: Six elementary, one middle school and one high school. The schools were selected with the help of the child nutrition department to determine which schools would be able to implement the pilot. The pilot began in March—National Nutrition Month—and ended in May.

Labels were placed on all entrées, side dishes and desserts. Each day a student would change out the cards for the day’s lunch offerings. Nicole Hill, vice chair of SHAC, said this was done to help get student buy-in to the program and to generate student interest. 

Hill said the original plan for the pilot was to compare the purchases made between schools that ran the pilot and control schools that did not run the pilot, but because the individual schools might serve different numbers of options, Hill said it would be impossible to compare the pilot and control schools to determine the effect the labels had on students purchasing more nutritious options.  

Instead, SHAC decided to survey adults who helped implement the pilot and who had monitored the students’ behavior in the cafeteria lines. When asked, “In your opinion, how did nutrition labels displayed during the lunch period impact decisions among students?”, 17.4% indicated that the labels significantly influenced food selections and 69.6% said the labels somewhat influenced food selections.

Marilyn Moody, senior director of child nutrition services for the district, said she noticed the students and staff reading the labels. “What I observed was amazement at the number of calories in some entrées,” Moody said. “ I did see a group of students select the hot dog, a low-nutrient dense item, over the enchilada, a high-nutrient dense item, simply because the hot dog had fewer calories. We need to teach nutrient density when making wise choices. We placed the chart of one-third recommended daily allowances for students on the serving line so that they could see just how many calories they need at lunch. This helped to put the labels into perspective. We plan to try food pyramid labels in our next pilot schools.”

Mitchell said they hope to expand the project, especially since it is relatively inexpensive. “We are really interested in raising awareness,” Mitchell said. “For change to take place, it would have to happen over time. Behavior change may be the second or third step.”