Abstract
School meals should focus on quality of life issues, particularly on reducing food shortages, overweight, obesity and its consequences. As an essential tool for quality assurance, creating the menu is an activity of great complexity and requires multidisciplinary knowledge. This activity covers the observation of countless aspects of quality, highlighting nutritional, sensory, cultural, hygienic, and sanitary issues, among others. This study aims to identify and analyze instruments and methods to evaluate school menus in different countries. The authors developed specific search strategies for Scopus, Web of Science, Science Direct, Pubmed, Lilacs, ProQuest Global, and Google Scholar. The included studies’ methodological quality was assessed using the statistical analysis and meta-analysis review tool (MASTARI). A total of 16 cross-sectional studies met the inclusion criteria and were analyzed. Brazil and Spain were the countries that presented the highest number of studies (n = 5; 31.25% for each). The majority of the studies have a qualitative approach (n = 12, 75%), and only 25% (n = 4) of the studies present quantitative assessment methods to evaluate school menus. No school menu assessment tools were found to assess all aspects of menu planning. The results show a lack of a methodology or of instruments for evaluating the menus offered for school meals that can contribute to better dietary care offered to students.
Highlights
In Brazil, the studies mainly discussed a checklist to evaluate the school menu (n = 1) [2], adequacy of serving portions meeting the premises of the national school feeding program (n = 1) [15], and the method of evaluating school menus by the Brazil and Spain were the countries that presented the highest number of studies (n = 5; 31.25% for each)
The results showed that Brazil and Spain were the countries that presented the largest number of studies evaluating menus
Considering that students spend most of their day at school, eating up to three meals, it is imperative to control and evaluate school menus
Summary
Publisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Inadequate nutrition is one of the main challenges representing a threat to individuals’ health, including their well-being and productivity. This results in high socioeconomic costs for societies in all regions of the world. Early healthy eating habits are essential to reduce the risk of immediate and long-term health problems [1]
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