Nutrition guidelines and standards for school meals

At present, there is no standardized methodology or globally recognized process to set context-specific and food systems-based nutrition standards for school meals and other foods available at school. At the same time, there are no widespread validated indicators to measure the adherence to and effects of such standards in schoolchildren’s diet quality. FAO is currently implementing a project to address these gaps, by designing a methodology that countries can use to devise nutrition standards and other guidelines for ensuring the adequacy of their school meals for targeted children and adolescents. Together with complementary measures, such as food education, the application of the standards is expected to improve nutrition outcomes in the long term. The purpose of embedding this PhD research into the project is two-fold: to provide evidence for the effectiveness of the methodology and to support the development of indicators to measure the effects of optimal school meals. Therefore, the specific objective of the research is to assess the effects of optimized school meals (compliant with nutrition standards) on diet outcomes of schoolchildren in selected schools in Ghana and Cambodia.