Analysis of the energy value and structure of school meals from the viewpoint of childhood obesity prevention

Abstract

The continual global rise in the number of people with obesity across all age categories requires redefining existing and finding new public health and other measures for primary, secondary and tertiary obesity prevention. There is also a permanent trend of growing numbers of overweight and obese school-age children. The school environment plays an important role in establishing and maintaining adequate eating patterns, and balanced school meals are one of the mechanisms for modifying nutritional risk factors. The aim of this research was to determine the energy value of school meals, compare the results obtained with the normed caloric-nutritional values and assess the potential impact of school nutrition quality on the occurrence of childhood obesity. The study included 45 samples of school meals from 13 primary schools in Belgrade. The most common type of meal was made up of individual samples of lunches (88.9%). The calculated energy value of the lunches ranged from 332.1 to 990.4 kcal, with an average value of 648.1 kcal. By classifying the sample lunches into three groups compared to the recommended energy value (lower, optimal and higher energy value), statistically significant differences were found in the deviation of the analysed lunch meals energy values from the norm. Of the analysed meal samples, 53.3% were found to exceed the recommended energy value by more than 10%, while 15.6% were found to have an energy value that was more than 10% lower than the recommended value. The energy-nutritional composition of the meal was fully balanced in a small number of meal samples studied (17.5% of all samples examined). These findings indicate that measures need to be undertaken to harmonize the energy-nutritional composition and structure of school meals with the existing norm, as well as to possibly consider changing the energy range for lunch in the legislation regulating student nutrition in primary schools. The development of a professional and methodological instruction for the implementation of external control of student nutrition in primary schools and systematic collection of data on the control performed would serve to comprehensively assess the energy and nutritional quality of the student's nutrition and to develop National Guidelines for Nutrition in Primary Schools.