Updated School Meal Standards: working towards a common goal of healthy children and helping them reach their full potential.
School meals will continue to include fruits and vegetables, emphasize whole grains, and give kids the right balance of nutrients for healthy, tasty meals. For the first time, schools will focus on products with less added sugar, especially in school breakfast.
School nutrition professionals continue to make school meals the healthiest meals children eat in a day! To take school meals to the next level, USDA is updating the school nutrition standards after considering recommendations from the most recent Dietary Guidelines for Americans and listening to a diverse range of voices with experience in child nutrition and health.
By law, certain adults without dependents can only receive SNAP benefits beyond three months in a three-year period unless they meet specific work requirements. We refer to this as the “time limit.”
Here's how the WIC food packages are changing.
The Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children – also known as WIC – supports maternal and child health by providing nutritious supplemental foods, nutrition education, breastfeeding promotion and support, and referrals to important health care and other social services.
This analysis helps to estimate the nutritional quality of the 2022 FDPIR food package 'as offered' using the Healthy Eating Index scoring algorithm. This will provide an update to the first HEI estimate of the 2014 FDPIR food package. The project also aims to estimate the HEIs of the food packages 'as delivered' to participants.
Healthy Eating Index scores range from 0 to 100 and are a measure of diet quality used to assess how well a set of foods aligns with the Dietary Guidelines for Americans. A higher score is ideal. The FDPIR Food Package scores an 84. This is higher than the average U.S. diet, which scores a 59.