Changes to school lunches lowered students' average BMI, study shows

BOSTON - Schools were forced to improve lunches more than a decade ago and a study shows the changes are making a difference.

Healthier school lunches didn't just happen on their own. It took an act of Congress and years of adjustments for meals at school to gain nutritional value.

The Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act (HHFA) of 2010 was passed during the Obama Administration. The policy forced school districts across the country to reconsider how they defined a healthy school meal. Mainly, moving from counting calories to counting nutritional totals.

A study by the JAMA Network followed thousands of students from 2010-to-2020 and found those changes to nutrition-based lunches consistently lowered the average body mass index (BMI) in students year to year.

Mellissa Honeywood is the Director of Food Nutrition Services for Cambridge Public Schools.

"I have been here for 10 years," said Honeywood. "You won't see a chicken nugget, a chicken tender, a chicken patty, because that is just what they are, an end product. I want my staff to work with ingredients. The quality is higher, and it is having an impact on the students who are consuming them."

In the kitchen of Cambridge Rindge and Latin School, employees were busy slicing, chopping, and preparing ingredients to gear up for the lunch time rush.

Instead of processed foods, nearly everything in this school cafeteria is homemade. Honeywood said the bulk of the ingredients are locally sourced, making them more affordable for the district.

The JAMA Network study showed that roughly 30 million school children in the United States receive 50% of their daily calories during the school day. The HHFA argued that if schools focused on improving their half of the daily nutritional intake, it could make students healthier overall. That is precisely what the study finds.

"They switched from being able to account for having reimbursable meals through calorie numbers, or individual food components, to really digging down and encouraging schools and nutrition departments to think about the broader help overall," said Honeywood.