National Policies to Limit Nutrients, Ingredients, or Categories of Concern in School Meals: A Global Scoping Review.

The school food environment is a key intervention point for influencing children's and adolescents' diets. As more countries establish school meal programs to provide critical nourishment to students, establishing standards for the foods served can increase the consumption of key nutrients and limit the consumption of foods that do not build health. This global scoping review explores the prevalence and basic characteristics of national policies that regulate food served through school meals across 193 countries, particularly by restricting the provision of categories, nutrients, or ingredients of nutritional concern.

National Policies to Limit Food Marketing and Competitive Food Sales in Schools: A Global Scoping Review.

School food environments contribute to children's nutritional intake and overall health. As such, the World Health Organization and other public health organizations encourage policies that restrict children's access and exposure to foods and beverages that do not build health in and around schools. This global scoping review explores the presence and characteristics of policies that restrict competitive food sales and marketing for unhealthy foods across 193 countries using evidence from policy databases, gray literature, peer-reviewed literature, and primary policy documents.

Impact of warning labels on reducing health halo effects of nutrient content claims on breakfast cereal packages: A mixed-measures experiment.

Chile recently implemented a food labeling law that requires packaged foods with sugar, saturated fats, sodium, and/or calorie content that exceeds government-defined thresholds to carry a front-of-package warning for each excessive nutrient. This law does not prohibit the use of nutrient content (NC) marketing claims on packages, as long as the claims do not directly contradict the warnings. Yet, having NC claims alongside nutrient warnings might send mixed messages confusing consumers about the overall healthiness of a product.

Governmental policies to reduce unhealthy food marketing to children.

Reducing children's exposure to food marketing is an important obesity prevention strategy. This narrative review describes current statutory regulations that restrict food marketing; reviews available evidence on the effects of these regulations; and compares policy design elements in Chile and the United Kingdom. Currently, 16 countries have statutory regulations on unhealthy food marketing to children.

Federal Nutrition Program Revisions Impact Low-income Households' Food Purchases.

Introduction: The Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children (WIC) required major revisions to food packages in 2009; effects on nationwide low-income household purchases remain unexamined.

Methods: This study examines associations between WIC revisions and nutritional profiles of packaged food purchases from 2008 to 2014 among 4,537 low-income households with preschoolers in the U.S.

No Fat, No Sugar, No Salt . . . No Problem? Prevalence of "Low-Content" Nutrient Claims and Their Associations with the Nutritional Profile of Food and Beverage Purchases in the United States.

Background: Nutrient claims are a commonly used marketing tactic, but the association between claims and nutritional quality of products is unknown. The objective of this study was to examine trends in the proportion of packaged food and beverage purchases with a nutrient claim, whether claims are associated with improved nutritional profile, and whether the proportion of purchases with claims differs by race/ethnicity or socioeconomic status.

Methods: This cross-sectional study examined nutrient claims on more than 80 million food and beverage purchases from a transaction-level database of 40,000 US households from 2008 to 2012.