Team Nutrition: theory is sound but practice could be costly

Nation's Restaurant News, Sept 16, 1996 by Paul King

With its Team Nutrition initiative, the U.S. Department of Agriculture has strengthened its role as watchdog over the health of our nation's school-children.

Team Nutrition is the marketing and operational guide for school foodservices that are implementing the latest set of dietary guidelines, which went into effect July 1. More than 90,000 schools are part of the National School Lunch Program and, consequently, are required to follow the guidelines, which essentially limit the amount of fat ingested by school kids to less than 30 percent of their total calories.

Major school-foodservice contractors, including Aramark and Marriott Management Services, already have begun to follow the guidelines. However, a large number of independently operated school foodservices have requested waivers because they are not prepared to meet the standards or because they don't understand the methods used to determine fat-calorie percentages or the paper work involved in verifying their statistics.

Waivers are being granted with the understanding that, as far as the USDA is concerned, compliance is not a matter of if but of when. The regulations passed in June 1995, are the law of the land.

In addition, the USDA has spent an estimated $20 million on its Team Nutrition project, a figure that includes marketing materials, healthful recipes and the rights to use Disney characters from the movie "The Lion King" as bait to attract young students' attention.

The admirable goal of the USDA is to reduce the amount of fat that children consume and teach them how to make dietary changes that they can sustain throughout their lives.

The question that remains as schools slowly comply with the USDA regulations is, How effective is this latest initiative going to be? The program is not without its doubters, and the points being raised definitely are valid.

Points that school foodservice directors -- and the USDA -- must consider include the following:

Who really will benefit from the new regulations? The mandates apply only to those schools that participate in the NSLP and receive food subsidies from the USDA. Schools that meet those criteria generally are those institutions that have high percentages of their students receiving either free or reduced price lunches.

Those students, who come from poor families, often eat properly only when they are in schools -- indeed, for a disturbingly large number of them, school breakfast and lunch are the only meals they eat. That being the case, school foodservice providers may be improving the health of those kids over the short term, but they effectively are prevented from teaching them how to eat because of the environment in which those children live.

How user-friendly are the materials the USDA is providing to schools? One of the complaints about the USDA program is that nutrition-analysis software the USDA has approved is not interchangeable. So schools that already have a computer-driven nutrient-analysis program must input that information into another program -- a costly and time-consuming measure.

Some directors have complained that the program would increase labor costs and paper work. Schools that find the program too costly or laborious likely will drop out of the NSLP, thus removing them from USDA scrutiny and effectively scuttling the USDA's efforts.

Can any USDA program survive school foodservices' need to be financially stable? Particularly in high schools, foodservice managers often operate two lines -- one that distributes a USDA-approved, reimbursable meal and another that allows students to purchase items a la carte.

If the a la carte line, which is where foodservices make their money, does not offer a wide variety of popular foods-such as french fries, chicken nuggets and similar items -- students will not eat there. So some districts find themselves removing high-fat items from the reimbursable meals and placing them on the a la carte line.

Consequently, a Catch-22 develops. Students with money can skirt the rules and, as a result, don't learn anything. Students from poorer families eat properly while in school but don't have the same opportunity to practice healthful eating once they leave campus.