Washington [US]June 18 (ANI): Universal school lunch programs make students healthier and increase their lifetime income by 3 percent, according to a unique study from Lund University.
The results of the study were published in the journal “The Review of Economic Studies”.
Health differences arise early in life and play an important role in financial outcomes among adults. Nevertheless, there are few studies on the long-term effects of school-based business policy that aim to counteract them.
Researchers from Lund University and Stockholm University can now show that universal school lunch programs have significant long-term benefits for students’ education, general health and income.
“Today we take school lunches for granted in Sweden. But the fact is that it was a very conscious investment when Sweden introduced free lunches in the 1940s. These cooked meals were carefully planned in terms of nutrition. This raises the question: did it affect students’ well-being on We wanted to find out, says Petter Lundborg, professor of economics at Lund University.
Sweden, Finland and Estonia have been serving free school meals for a long time, unlike the neighboring countries Norway and Denmark, where students bring their own lunch. In other countries, such as the United States and the United Kingdom, poorer students are offered school meals, while others pay.
In the new study, the researchers examine the Swedish school lunch program that was gradually introduced in different municipalities from the mid-1940s. The program offered nutritious school lunches to all Swedish primary school students free of charge.
The researchers focused on the introduction of school lunches between 1959 and 1969. They discovered that the initiative had a positive impact on students’ height, their health as young adults, the level of education and their lifetime income.
“Our study shows that universal efforts that provide children with nutritious meals can be seen as a long-term investment. In other words, ensuring that children eat well also pays off later in life in terms of health, education and income,” says Dan- Olof Rooth, Professor of Economics at the Institute for Social Research (SOFI) at Stockholm University.
The study shows, among other things, that both boys and girls who participated in the school meal program throughout their schooling were higher than those who did not have access to the program. Pupils who received school meals for a full nine years in primary school became almost 1 cm taller and went to university more often compared to pupils without access to the program. But most importantly, students had three percent higher lifetime income.
“We also noted some interesting differences in the effects, with children from poor households benefiting the most, although children from all households benefited to some extent. Students from poor families had six percent higher lifetime incomes and students from other households had about two percent higher lifetime incomes. The reform thus benefited all students, from both poor and rich families “, says Petter Lundborg.
The results are related: the students ate nutritious food at school, they became taller and more educated, which can largely explain why they had a better income throughout their lives. However, the researchers found no long-term effects on mortality, morbidity or sick leave.
The effects of school meal programs can also be caused by factors that have nothing to do with nutrition. Therefore, the researchers also collected data on school absenteeism from municipal archives in Sweden. The researchers’ analysis shows that the introduction of the school lunch program did not lead to any changes in the school visit, which was high even before the school meals were introduced.
“A reasonable interpretation of our results is that students became more receptive to what they learned when they ate a nutritious lunch. This is in line with a previous study, which showed that test results among eleven-year-olds increased during the first year after the introduction of nutritious school meals in in connection with the Jamie Oliver campaign in the UK, โsaid Dan-Olof Rooth.
Petter Lundborg and Dan-Olof Rooth – who conducted the study together with Dr. Jesper Alex-Petersen – believes that their results are relevant to many western countries today, even though the Swedish school lunch program was introduced in the 1950s and 1960s. Sweden was a rich country where school children did not lack food but where parents lacked knowledge about healthy eating habits. The reform made school food nutritious and the same for everyone.
“It is important for many countries even today, because school meals and their nutritional content are a recurring issue. Our results show significant long-term economic benefits of school meals. You get a lot of ‘bang for your buck’ – it is extremely well-invested money”, concluded Petter Lundborg .
The researchers used recently collected historical data on the gradual implementation of the program in municipalities in Sweden between the years 1959 and 1969. During this period, 265 municipalities introduced the program, with approximately the same number of municipalities each year.
These historical data were linked to administrative registers that cover the population of primary school students, ie. about 1.5 million students born 1942-1965.
Using a difference in difference design, they estimated the effects of the school lunch reform on a wide range of results obtained from income and education registers, the military employment register, the medical birth register and the hospital and death registers. (ANI)
Source: sn.dk