School Lunches Happen Before Recess

Many schoolchildren throw away their half-eaten cafeteria lunches so that they can run outside to play. Recess is often held after lunch so children hurry to finish so that they can go play. This results in wasted fruits, vegetables, entrees, milk, and students not meeting their nutritional needs. However, it has been found that if recess is held before lunch, students come to lunch with healthy appetites and less urgency and are more likely to eat their fruits, vegetables, entree, and milk. Poor nutritional intake is linked to children’s difficulty to learn, and increased discipline problems.4 So as Registered Dietitians/ School Food Service Directors, it would be our concern to help improve the intake of these students, and a simple way to …show more content…
This creates an “as quickly as possible” affect on lunch, making the students either skip their lunch, scarf down their lunch, or pass on eating some items.6 There are no current standards for the amount of lunchtime length. On average, lunch periods are scheduled for 25-30 minutes, but average to be about 20 minutes or less as students have to go through the lunch lines and then eat.2, Iowa And if lunch is scheduled before recess, students are eager to get outside and play, which may have the students rush through lunch or skip it all together.7 According to the USDA, 7% to 20% of children do not consume lunch on any given day.8 When children skip meals, they have a tendency to consume empty calories from snacks contributing as much as 27% of their calories.7 These snacks contain added fats and sugars, which can lead to poor health outcomes. The National School Lunch Program (NSLP) provides meals to >30 millions students everyday.2 Many of these students rely on the NSLP to provide them with the needed nutrients that are important to improving the overall health of the children’s diet. School lunches provide an estimated 35% of daily calories for participating students.3 NSLP sets age specific nutrients standards to ensure that schools serve nutritious, well-balanced meals, see Table …show more content…
However, it is shown that there has been increased milk consumption, and less plate waste. Which has lead researchers to conclude that there is also an improvement in consumption of entrees, vegetables, and fruits. In the RBL group milk consumption was 1.3 oz greater than the recess after lunch (RAL) group (5.7 oz vs. 4.4 oz), and 20% of the RBL students drank the entire carton of milk (42% vs. 25%).7 This improvement means that the RBL students were 1.5 times more likely to meet the nutritional guidelines for calcium.7 In different studies, overall plate waste was reduced from 34.9% to 24.3%, and some schools experienced a 54% increase in fruit and vegetable consumption compared to their baseline consumption.4,6 Students that had < 20 minutes to eat consumed 13% less of their entrée, 10% less of their milk, and 12% less of their vegetable when compared to students that had at least 25 minutes to