School meals and snacks in Canadian primary schools: assessing diet quality among schoolchildren
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Background School food programs (SFPs) are an effective strategy for improving children's diet. Canada does not have a national SFP but rather a patchwork of school food offerings, and their impact on children's diet is unknown. This study assessed the diet quality of Canadian primary schoolchildren who accessed meals and snacks provided by school. Methods We surveyed 2,366 students aged 9-14 years (49% girls) from 32 schools in socioeconomically disadvantaged communities in two Canadian provinces. Using a 24-hour diet recall, students recorded foods and beverages consumed for meals (breakfast, lunch) and snacks (morning, afternoon) during school hours. Students also indicated whether the meal or snack was provided by their school (yes/no). Diet quality was assessed using the Diet Quality Index - International (DQI-I) score (ranging from 0 to 100, with higher scores indicating higher diet quality) and its components (adequacy, variety, balance, moderation). Multivariable linear regression models were used to examine the association of school-provided meals and snacks with diet quality. Results Only 293 (12%) students consumed at least one school-provided meal or snack during school hours. These students most often consumed school-provided morning snack (43%) and least often breakfast (18%). Consuming at least one meal or snack provided by school was associated with a higher overall DQI-I score (β = 1.8, 95% CI = 0.7 to 3.0), as well as higher component scores for variety (β = 0.5, 95% CI = 0.1 to 0.9) and adequacy (β = 0.9, 95% CI = 0.4 to 1.5). Consuming snacks provided by school was associated with higher overall DQI-I scores (morning snack β = 2.2, 95% CI = 0.5 to 3.8; afternoon snack β = 3.1, 95% CI = 1.1 to 5.1); no significant associations were found for breakfast or lunch provided by school. Conclusions School meals and snacks, though consumed by only one in eight primary schoolchildren, may contribute to better diet quality, with the greatest impact observed for snacks. Key messages • The availability of meals and snacks provided by schools in Canada was low, with only one in eight primary schoolchildren having consumed school meals or snacks. • Diet quality was higher among students who consumed school meals or snacks than those who did not, with the greatest benefit observed for snacks.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.041 | 0.009 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".