Fostering Healthy and Sustainable Diets Through School Meals

Summary

School meals have considerable potential to shape children's diets and reduce the climate impact of meals. This study applies linear programming for developing and implementing a climate friendly, nutritious and affordable school lunch menu. The new menu plan will be compared to the baseine menu during a 4-week intervention trial. The outcomes will be food waste, consumption, and pupils' satisfaction with the meals before and after introducing the new meal plan by interrupted time series analysis. Our hypothesis is that school meals can be optimized to be nutritious and more climate friendly, without negatively affecting acceptance, food waste and cost.

A number of primary schools in one Swedish municipality with the same menu plan for all schools participated in the study. Their current meal supply was recorded in the form of a food list including amount and cost of each item over a 4-week period. This list was then optimized with linear programming to be as similar as possible to the baseline diet but with a 40% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions. No new foods were introduced and none were removed from the list. Nutritionally adequacy was ensured by included constraints into the model. The optimized food list was handed to a professional meal planner and a new menu plan was developed based on the revised food list. Data on food waste and consumption was collected daily during a baseline period of four weeks, and during the four-week intervention period. School lunch satisfaction was assessed twice with an online questionnaire at baseline and during the intervention. After the end of intervention, students and meal staff were interviewed regarding their experiences with the new meals.

Conditions

• Food Habits

Interventions

OTHER

OPTIMAT

The intervention was to serve a new school lunch menu plan as similar as possible to a baseline menu plan but 40% lower in greenhouse gas emissions, being nutritionally adequate and no more expensive.

Sponsors & Collaborators

• The Swedish Research Council for Environment, Agricultural Sciences and Spatial Planning (FORMAS)

  collaborator OTHER_GOV

• Göteborg University

  collaborator OTHER

• University College Copenhagen

  collaborator OTHER

• Karolinska Institutet

  lead OTHER

Principal Investigators

• Liselotte Schäfer Elinder, professor · Karolinsk Institutet

Study Design

Allocation

NA

Purpose

PREVENTION

Masking

NONE

Model

SINGLE_GROUP

Eligibility

Min Age

6 Years

Max Age

16 Years

Sex

ALL

Healthy Volunteers

Yes

Timeline & Regulatory

Start

2019-02-07

Primary Completion

2019-05-30

Completion

2019-08-30

Countries

• Sweden

Study Locations