The topic of concern that I am going to address is how school breakfast and lunch programs impact the family in various ways. School meal programs, especially breakfast programs, have gotten a significant amount of attention in recent years due to the many studies that have shown the benefits of having these programs. These studies have shown that students who participate in school breakfast programs have better nutrition, less hunger, more food security, better performance in school, and the program could even improve the likelihood that students will eat breakfast on a regular basis (Bartfeld & Ryu, 2011). School breakfast and lunch programs are moving toward having a 100% participation rate, because when students who participated in the programs were analyzed and compared with the non-participation students, results showed significant differences in the categories listed above. (Moffitt, 1995). Being a Dietetics student, I am extremely aware of the importance of nutritious school meal programs because children spend most of their habit-forming years in school. Students need to develop positive breakfast and lunch choices in order to develop and maintain a healthy lifestyle in the future.
As I briefly stated before, there have been studies done to compare the students who participate in school breakfast and lunch programs with the students who choose not to. The findings indicated that a surprising number of students do not participate in the programs altogether. The main finding for this was due to the lack of interest in the meals being served (Moffitt, 1995). Most schools receive funding from the USDA in order to serve meals to children, so they must also abide by the nutrition requirements that are established (Bartfeld & Kim, 2010). The problem that occurs with participation and the number of benefits that students can gain is that these nutritional requirements seem to become stricter every time they are revised.