A research group of Atsushi Miyawaki, a graduate student of the Graduate School of Medicine, the University of Tokyo, a specially appointed associate professor Lee Jin-shu, and a professor Renki Kobayashi, found that providing a diet based on appropriate nutritional standards in school feeding is an adolescent obesity. It was suggested that it is one of the effective measures to reduce the number of people.
Japan is known to have a low adolescent obesity rate.In Japanese elementary and junior high school meals, "providing meals" is cited as one of the reasons for the low obesity rate, because all school students eat the same meals provided under appropriate nutritional standards. I came.However, there has been no evidence to support it.
Therefore, this time, the group has obtained "prefecture-level (prefecture) -level school lunch implementation rate" and "prefecture-level nutritional status indicators (overweight, obesity, etc.) from public data of official statistics. Percentage of lean students, average height, average weight) ”was extracted by gender and age.After considering the nutritional status index of the previous year, prefecture, age, observation year, etc., the relationship between the prefectural-level school lunch implementation rate of the previous year and the nutritional status index of the following year was investigated.
As a result of the analysis, it was found that when the prefectural level feeding implementation rate increased by 10%, the proportion of overweight boys decreased by 0.37% and the proportion of obese boys decreased by 0.23% in the following year.For girls, although the results were not statistically significant, there was a tendency to reduce overweight and obesity.In other words, it was suggested that the implementation of school lunch is one of the effective measures to reduce obesity in adolescence.
This study is the first to demonstrate the effect of feeding actually reducing overweight and obesity.
Paper information:[Journal of Public Health] Impact of the school lunch program on overweight and obesity among junior high school students: a nationwide study in Japan
