Q&A with Nordic School Meals research author

In May this year, we published a fascinating Paper of the Month blog post on Nordic school meals' influence on children’s school performance. The following Q&A is with the lead author of that paper, Louise Bergmann Sørensen from the Department of Nutrition and Exercise, University of Copenhagen.  Q.      Your study chose to focus on the impact of diet in well-nourished children.  Would you expect a different outcome if the study was carried out in under-nourished children? Yes, we would expect a greater effect in under-nourished children, since the intervention meals would constitute a greater part of their diet and there would be a larger difference between dietary intake in the control and intervention period. Q.      There has been much research into the benefits of children eating a nutritious breakfast.  Would you expect different results in the attention, processing speed and maths tests if the study included breakfast? School breakfast programmes and observational studies indicate that breakfast frequency and quality positive effects on school performance. If the study had included a nutritious breakfast, it is plausible that the impact on dietary intake would have been larger and thereby we could expect greater cognitive effects. It is also possible that we would see different effects if the study had included breakfast. It is difficult to predict the effects on specific tests, but school breakfast programmes seem to have effects classroom behaviour...
Source: The Nutrition Society - Category: Nutrition Authors: Source Type: news