Sign On to Support Healthy School Meals

From Moms Rising (https://www.momsrising.org/):

Would you like to see healthier, more nutritious school meals served up in your child’s school cafeteria? You (Yes, YOU!) now have a window of opportunity to make that happen by supporting the nutrition standards just proposed by the Biden-Harris administration for the National School Lunch and School Breakfast programs.

Take action now at https://action.momsrising.org/sign/momsrising_petition_school_nutrition_standards – Tell the Biden Administration that you support the new healthier school nutrition standards they have proposed!

**When you click through to sign, you will also have the ability to add a personal experience, if you have one. Sharing your family’s experience with school meals will help to demonstrate why these new nutrition standards matter.

These scientifically-based nutrition standards propose to help children be healthy by limiting sugar, increasing whole grains, and lowering sodium in school meals, including school lunches. [1] They will also go a long way towards reducing children’s risk of developing heart disease, type 2 diabetes, and other health conditions. [2] The new meal nutrition standards will be implemented gradually over multiple years to give school nutrition programs plenty of time to implement the changes.

MomsRising is going to submit a letter to the Biden-Harris Administration supporting these new science-based nutrition standards. Can you join our letter?

SIGN our letter to the Biden Administration to say “We support these new science-based nutrition standards for making school meals healthier!”

The proposed standards, which align with the 2020-2025 Dietary Guidelines for Americans (DGA), will lead to healthier food for the many schoolchildren who rely on school meals to learn and grow. [3] For many families struggling to put food on the table, school breakfast and lunch are often the most reliable meals of the day for children and the best chance that these children will have to eat a well-rounded healthy meal. A new assessment even shows that aligning school meal nutrition standards with the 2020-2025 DGA is likely to improve child nutrition, increase student participation in school meals, and improve both food security and academic performance. [4]

Quick signature: Add your name to our letter of support for nutrition standards likely to improve both food security and academic performance for schoolchildren across the country!

The proposed standards to protect kids’ health will:

Introduce added sugar limits for school breakfast and lunch, starting with sugar limits on certain high-sugar products like breakfast cereals and yogurt, and later phasing in a limit on the total amount of added sugar in all meals and snacks;
Increase whole grains, requiring at least 80% of the weekly grains in school breakfast and lunch to be grain-rich;
Reduce sodium gradually, aligning more closely to the FDA voluntary standards of lowering sodium levels;
Strengthen the Buy American requirements in school meals;
Support schools in using more locally grown foods;
Invest in small and rural schools to help them improve their school meal nutritional quality; and
Seek input on how to include more culturally appropriate foods in meals served to American Indian and Alaskan Native students. [5]