Food for Thought: Children's Diets in the 1990s

Are children getting too few vitamins and minerals in their diets? Are they consuming too many soft drinks? Do school meal programs make a difference in their diets? Our policy brief suggests that efforts by policymakers to lower children’s fat intakes appear to be succeeding, but that high intakes of dietary fat and added sugars remain a cause for concern. The brief summarizes two studies of the diets of school-age children as of the mid-1990s, examines relationships between children’s dietary intake and their participation in the school meal programs, and notes changes in their dietary intake between the early 1990s and mid-1990s.

On the positive side, consumption of vegetables and grain products increased during this period, the proportion of calories from fat decreased, and most children consumed enough vitamins and minerals. In addition, the school meal programs—namely the School Breakfast Program and the National School Lunch Program—had important effects on children’s diets. Participation in the programs was associated with greater intakes of several vitamins and minerals, and lower intakes of added sugars, although participants also had higher intakes of dietary fat.

Aspects of children’s diets that continue to be of concern include an increase in soda consumption in recent years, especially low levels of vitamin and mineral intake among teenage girls, and the large percentage of children who fail to eat as many servings of the five major food groups as the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s food guide pyramid recommends.

The brief is based on two studies of children’s nutrition that Mathematica conducted for the Food and Nutrition Service of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, using the 1989-1991 and 1994-1996 Continuing Survey of Food Intakes by Individuals, which provided data for more than 5,000 children ages 6 to 18. Newly developed statistical procedures helped produce better estimates of the prevalence of inadequate dietary intakes. These procedures allowed researchers to assess the adequacy of children’s diets based on estimates of what children usually eat, rather than what they happened to eat on a single day. For printed copies, contact Jackie Allen at (609) 275-2350.

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