Number of meal components, nutritional guidelines, vegetarian meals, avoiding ruminant meat: what is the best trade-off for improving school meal sustainability?
Purpose: School meals have the potential to promote more sustainable diets. Our aim was to identify the best trade-off between nutrition and the environment by applying four levers to school meals: (i) reducing the number of meal components, (ii) complying with the French school nutritional guidelin...
| Published in: | European Journal of Nutrition Vol. 61; no. 6; pp. 3003 - 3019 |
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| Main Authors: | , , , |
| Format: | equations & formulas research tables/charts Journal Article |
| Published: |
Springer Nature
Sep2022
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| Online Access: | View this record in EBSCOhost |
| fields | @attributes: recordID: 1 pdfLink: plink: https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=ccm&AN=158430003&site=ehost-live header: @attributes: shortDbName: ccm uiTerm: 158430003 longDbName: CINAHL Complete uiTag: AN controlInfo: bkinfo: dissinfo: jinfo: jid: 14366207 CR0 jtl: European Journal of Nutrition issn: 14366207 maglogo: N pubinfo: dt: Sep2022 vid: 61 iid: 6 pid: 237 pub: Springer Nature place: New York, New York artinfo: ui: 158430003 155924928 158430003 158430003 10.1007/s00394-022-02868-1 158430003 ppf: 3003 ppct: 16 formats: fmt: – @attributes: type: T – @attributes: type: P tig: atl: Number of meal components, nutritional guidelines, vegetarian meals, avoiding ruminant meat: what is the best trade-off for improving school meal sustainability? aug: au: Poinsot, Romane Vieux, Florent Maillot, Matthieu Darmon, Nicole affil: MoISA, Univ Montpellier, CIRAD, CIHEAM-IAMM, INRAE, Institut Agro, IRD, Montpellier, France sug: subj: Meals Analysis Nutrition Policy Vegetarianism Meat Schools France Food Services Quality Improvement Food Quality Evaluation Environment Organizational Compliance Human France Fish Greenhouse Gases Meal Preparation Energy Intake Descriptive Statistics Comparative Studies Nutritive Value Pediatric Obesity Prevention and Control ab: Purpose: School meals have the potential to promote more sustainable diets. Our aim was to identify the best trade-off between nutrition and the environment by applying four levers to school meals: (i) reducing the number of meal components, (ii) complying with the French school nutritional guidelines, (iii) increasing the number of vegetarian meals, and/or (iv) avoiding ruminant meat. Methods: Levers were analyzed alone or in combination in 17 scenarios. For each scenario, 100 series of 20 meals were generated from a database of 2316 school dishes using mathematical optimization. The nutritional quality of the series was assessed through the mean adequacy ratio (MAR/2000 kcal). Seven environmental impacts were considered such as greenhouse gas emissions (GHGE). One scenario, close to series usually served in French schools (containing four vegetarian meals, at least four ruminant meat-based meals, and at least four fish-based meals) was considered as the reference scenario. Results: Reducing the number of meal components induced an important decrease of the energy content but the environmental impact was little altered. Complying with school-specific nutritional guidelines ensured nutritional quality but slightly increased GHGE. Increasing the number of vegetarian meals decreased GHGE (from 11.7 to 61.2%) but decreased nutritional quality, especially when all meals were vegetarian (MAR = 88.1% against 95.3% in the reference scenario). Compared to the reference scenario, series with 12 vegetarian meals, 4 meals containing fish and 4 meals containing pork or poultry reduced GHGE by 50% while maintaining good nutritional quality (MAR = 94.0%). Conclusion: Updating French school nutritional guidelines by increasing the number of vegetarian meals up to 12 over 20 and serving non-ruminant meats and fish with the other meals would be the best trade-off for decreasing the environmental impacts of meals without altering their nutritional quality. pubtype: Academic Journal doctype: equations & formulas research tables/charts Journal Article ougenre: Article language: English refInfo: holdings: @attributes: islocal: N |
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