Compliance to Dietary Guidelines in Elementary School Food Service

The purpose of this study was to determine compliance to the Dietary Guidelines for Americans and to Recommend Dietary Allowances in Tennessee elementary school lunch programs and to determine training practices as they are related to nutrition. Fifty six of the 145 school food service supervisors in Tennessee participated in the study, a response rate 39%.

A four-part questionnaire was developed for all school food service supervisors in the state of Tennessee. The first three parts of the questionnaire consisted of items about types of food products used in cooking, the school food service supervisors' participation in training, and demographic information about the supervisors. In the fourth part of the questionnaire, menus were requested from each school for comparisons with Recommended Dietary Allowances (RDA) and Dietary Guidelines.

Using 1/3 of the RDA as a standard of adequacy, nutritional analysis of the menus, using Nutritionist III, showed more than adequate amounts of protein, vitamin A, vitamin C, vitamin B₆, folate, sodium, magnesium, calcium, iron, and zinc. Kilocalories were adequate for elementary school aged children. Fat intake was above the 30% recommended amount of kilocalories, fat represented 35.7% in this study. Sodium intake was 1000.9 ± 492.1 mg.

The study identified that some of the barriers to implementing the Dietary Guidelines were financial constraints, high saturated fat content of government commodities, lack of support for training, and lack of classroom nutrition education in the schools.