In the 10 years since the federal government established the Community Eligibility Provision (CEP), which enabled universal free meal programs for schools in low-income communities, studies have suggested the policy has wide-ranging benefits. Students in participating schools choose lunches with higher nutritional quality, are suspended less frequently and may perform better academically.
Now, as cuts to food assistance programs threaten to slash access to universal school meals, a new study led by the University of Washington finds another potential benefit to the programs: Students in participating schools were less likely to have high blood pressure, suggesting that universal free meals might be a powerful tool for improving public health.
“High blood pressure is an important public health problem that isn’t studied as much on a population level as obesity,” said Anna Localio, a UW postdoctoral researcher of health systems and population health and lead author of the study. “We have evidence that CEP increases participation in school meals, and we also have evidence that school meals are more nutritious than meals that kids obtain elsewhere. This is a public health policy that is delivering nutritious meals to children who may not have previously had access.”
For the study, published Sept. 25 in JAMA Network Open, researchers linked two datasets that rarely interact. They obtained medical records of patients ages 4-18 from community health organizations, and used patients’ addresses to identify the school they attended. The data encompassed 155,778 young people attending 1,052 schools, mostly in California and Oregon.
Researchers estimated the percentage of students with high blood pressure before and after schools opted into universal free meals, and compared those results against eligible schools that had not yet participated in the program. They also tracked students’ average systolic and diastolic blood pressure readings. All data were aggregated at the school level.
They found that school participation in the CEP was associated with a 2.71% decrease in the proportion of students with high blood pressure, corresponding to a 10.8% net drop over five years. School participation in CEP was also associated with a decrease in students’ average diastolic blood pressure.