[3] The Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act allows USDA, for the first time in 30 years, opportunity to make real reforms to the school lunch and breakfast programs by improving the critical nutrition and hunger safety net for millions of children.
[4] Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act and Michelle Obama were a step in transforming the food pyramid recommendation, which has been around since the early 1990s, into what is now known as "MyPlate".
[13] The Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act allows the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) to make significant changes to the school lunch program for the first time in over 30 years.
[1] In September 2012, students at Wallace High School in Sharon Springs, Kansas uploaded a video to YouTube complaining about students being hungry and not fed well enough to participate in their extracurricular activities or sports due to reduced portion sizes relative to those prior to the new law.
[20] A University of Vermont study found that the amount of food students did not eat but threw away instead increased by 56 percent after the implementation of the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act.
[21] However, a 2014 Harvard School of Public Health study found that food waste had not increased by a measurable percentage as a result of the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act.
[21] As stated previously, higher costs and loss of revenue were among the criticism that the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act of 2010 faced.
[25] Additionally, if more students were to opt out of the program due to a dislike of the new standards, this would result in less meals being sold, thereby leading to a loss of money.
[25][26] CBS News and the National Library of Medicine (NLM) bring up similar concerns, where several superintendents and schools stated that their districts had a drop in lunch sales within a year of the act's implementation.
[27] While the 2016 NLM article by Cohen et al. finds that the participation increases by the second year, the schools were still left worried over possible revenue loss.
[37] The Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act provides meals to children that normally could not afford those nutritious food items.
[20] While looking at the nutrition value of 1.7 million meals selected by 7,200 students in three middle and three high schools in an urban school district in Washington state, where the data was collected and compared in the 16 months before the standards were carried out with data collected in the 15 months after implementation; the information found that there was an increase in six nutrients: fiber, iron, calcium, vitamin A, vitamin C, and protein.
[24] While providing new meals with improvements in fruits, vegetables, amount of variety, and portion sizes, the calorie intake has also transformed.
Meanwhile, in others, they observed noticeable changes in BMI (the scale to determine obesity) prior to and following the passage of the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act of 2010.
To discover whether dietary changes were made, a JAMA study by Kinderknecht et al. compared the meals of students ages 5–18 who participated in the lunch programs prior to the implementation of the act and following it.
[41] Additionally, they noted how the act had put limits on calories, saturated fats, sodium, and fatty milk.
[42] Their conclusions provide evidence in support of the positive changes brought about by the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act of 2010.
In another study conducted at Northwestern University, school lunch programs were discovered to no longer be correlated with increased BMI scores following the implementation of the act in 2012.
[43] This meant that in the case of this study, the positive correlation between the school lunches and obesity was no longer apparent following the Healthy, Hunger-free Kids Act of 2010.
[44] In 2020, the federal government considered modifying the programs made by the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act of 2010 by offering even further flexibility.