Schools around the country are serving healthier food, but are the students eating it?
A new technology used by students will tell parents what kids are eating and send teachers and parents a health "report card."
Rush University Medical Center and Canyon Ranch Institute have teamed up to design and test a new program that tracks what students select on the cafeteria line, according to Medical Express.
The program is called Healthy School Meals Realized through Technology (SMART) Schools. A+ Café, a school nutrition software company, helped develop the technology system for the study.
Students at Chicago's Rufino Tamayo Charter School and Octavio Paz Charter School are participating in the new study that gives information on what they ate during breakfast and lunch.
Cafeteria workers scan the students' identification cards and use a touch-screen monitor to record each food item the student chooses for breakfast and lunch. The system allows researchers to document students' food choices and create a summary of their nutritional value.
Individual, comprehensive, one-page report cards on each student's food choices are sent to parents and teachers in both English and Spanish. The report card lists the nutritional value of each student's meals during the past week, such as calories per day and daily vegetable and fruit servings, along with information designed to advance the families' health knowledge so that students and parents can make more informed choices about their health and well-being.
Then, each week, parents and teachers receive a report on the nutritional value of their children's school meals along with healthy eating suggestions for each student.
"Most Chicago school parents receive a monthly cafeteria menu of what meals will be offered for breakfast and lunch for their child," said Brad Appelhans, associate professor of preventive medicine at Rush and a principal investigator of the study. "However, parents and teachers are generally unaware of what their children or student actually eat at school or how this fits into their overall diet and what they eat outside of school."
The Hillshire Brands Company donated $200,000 toward the pilot program. Hillshire Brands is a subsidiary of Tyson Foods, which owns the brands Jimmy Dean Sausage, Ball Park Franks and Hillshire Farm lunch meats.
Hot dogs, sausages and lunch meats have been known to contain high sodium content and labels should be read, experts advise. It is not known if the software sponsored by the Hillshire Brands Co. tracks sodium levels.