K12 Epicure Digital Menu Boards to Meet the New USDA School Nutrition Guidelines

Jan. 24, 2011 - PRLog -- Beverly Hills, CA – The newly published USDA School Nutrition Guidelines were on everyone’s mind and main topic of interest during the California CSNA School Nutritional Association Annual Conference in Pasadena, CA last week. The Epicure Digital Menu Boards that meet the New USDA School Nutrition Guidelines that featured at the show became a show highlight.

The newly published proposed USDA guidelines would encourage schools to provide at least one additional cup of vegetables daily for students, as well as more fruit, particularly during breakfast. It would require a reduction in sodium content, as well as saturated fat and trans fats. It would call for schools to offer only skim or low-fat milk and to ensure whole grain foods compose half of their grain offerings.

For the first time, the rules would set a calorie cap for any given lunch or breakfast. The caloric content in lunches would have to be between 550 and 650 calories for kindergarten through grade 5; 600 and 700 for grades 6 to 8; and 750 and 850 for high schoolers. The calorie caps for breakfast would be lower.

The regulations would affect school meal programs for low-income children -- programs covering about 32 million students. It's the first time the standards have been tightened in 15 years.

According to government data, almost 32 percent of children 6 to 19 years of age are overweight or obese; the number of obese children in this age range has trebled in the last few decades. These children are more likely to have risk factors associated with chronic diseases such as high blood pressure, high cholesterol, and Type 2 diabetes.

Fighting Childhood Obesity has become a major concern for school food services.

The healthcare reform bill tackles obesity by requiring calorie information on restaurant menus and aims to improve eating habits and reducing calorie intake by making consumers more aware BEFORE they buy. The overall goal is to reduce overweight and obesity rates as consumers learn to make healthier choices.

Children consume about 50 percent of their daily calorie intake while at school. With the new K12 Epicure Digital Menu Boards with nutritional menu labeling they will have the calorie information, other nutritional information, and tools to “eat well” according to the newly published USDA school nutrition guidelines. These will allow them to make healthier food choices at school as well as train them to read nutritional menu information while visiting restaurants.

Schools are doing their best to provide healthy food choices in their cafeterias and will do much more in the future, but the success of the fight against Childhood Obesity is in the hands of the students. They must learn how to make healthier choices when selecting their food.

Nutritional menu labeling by Epicure Digital informs students to make healthier meal choices by displaying nutritional data and icons next to menu items and providing nutritional recommendations and guidelines on multimedia digital menu boards designed for K-12 students.

Epicure Digital specializes in developing nutritional menu labeling systems to educate and inform customers to make healthier meal choices. These nutritional labels display as nutritional data, nutritional scoring, icons representing food groups, healthy choices, and allergens, whichever and whenever are applicable, next to menu items. All of this data can be easily entered manually or imported from third party nutritional scoring and food service management systems such as Computrition Hospitality Suite.

Digital menu boards with nutritional menu labeling were identified as one of the simplest and most effective ways to fight Childhood Obesity, with immediate proven results. They communicate with students while in line in the cafeteria, just when they are selecting their food, at the point of service. Digital menu boards are at the battlefront, ready to combat childhood obesity and educate students to make healthier food choices.

Yale scientists found that nutritional menu labeling results in the consumption of significantly fewer calories. The study appears online in the American Journal of Public Health.

Researchers from the Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity at Yale studied 303 adults in the New Haven community, dividing them into groups that saw a menu with no calorie labels, a menu with calorie labels, or a menu with calorie labels plus information on the recommended daily caloric intake for an average adult.

Participants in the two groups that saw calorie labels ate 14 percent fewer calories than the group that did not see calorie labels. Furthermore, when after-dinner eating was factored in, the group that saw menu labels as well as recommended calorie guidelines consumed an average of 250 fewer calories than those in the other group.

Epicure Digital Systems is a digital menu board company uniquely integrating its expertise in software technology and food service operations and marketing to create digital signage products and services for the food service industry. Its core product is the Epicure Digital Menu System. Its core services are menu engineering, nutritional menu labeling, and content creation.

Epicure Digital is a Cisco Eco Partner and provides Cisco Digital Media Suite (DMS) compatible digital menu board solutions and utilizes the DMP 4400 players for the Cisco DMS Compatible menu board systems.

Epicure Digital’s clients include colleges and universities, hospitals, K-12 schools, independent and chain restaurants, contract food service companies, business & industry, and cinemas and casinos among others.

The company’s website (http://www.epicuredigital.com) has an extensive portfolio of its client’s digital menu board projects.

For more information, contact:
Tommy Orpaz, 310-652-8246
torpaz@epicuredigital.com