In New York City schools, the federal School Breakfast Program wasn't associated with weight gain, as critics have claimed. But it wasn't linked to better academic performance either, as advocates and previous studies had suggested.
Findings from an analysis of city school department data were published by Sean Corcoran, PhD, of New York University, and colleagues, in the Journal of Policy Analysis and Management.
"Participation in the federally subsidized school breakfast program often falls well below its lunchtime counterpart. To increase take-up, many districts have implemented Breakfast in the Classroom (BIC), offering breakfast directly to students at the start of the school day. Beyond increasing participation, advocates claim BIC improves academic performance, attendance, and engagement. Others caution BIC has deleterious effects on child weight," Corcoran and colleagues wrote.
"While we find that providing breakfast in the classroom had large positive effects on participation in school breakfast programs, our analysis provides no evidence of hoped-for gains in academic performance, nor of feared increases in obesity," Corcoran said in a press release.
Corcoran and colleagues might have found evidence of improved academics if they had examined individual students' test scores, instead of comparing school-wide scores in schools that did and did not offer the program, said Lauri Wright, PhD, a spokesperson for the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics and professor of nutrition at the University of South Florida in Tampa.
"There are enough studies that have shown an effect, and those studies had better designs than this study," Wright said in an email to MedPage Today. "Unfortunately, the study design did not look at individuals participating in BIC and their academic scores pre- and post-program. That would have increased the ability to demonstrate change due to larger numbers and case control. [T]hey did an estimated impact based on schools rather than individual students."
Not all eligible students take advantage of the breakfast program, and those that didn't could have driven school test scores down, Wright suggested, adding that, "Academic performance is affected by many factors, and a more controlled study design might have better demonstrated any impact made."
Corcoran and colleagues examined data from the New York City Department of Education on about 200 public elementary and middle schools offering breakfast in some or all of their classrooms. The data included rates of breakfast program participation, student height and weight, demographics, attendance, and math and reading scores.
The investigators compared outcomes in schools that did and did not participate in the BIC, before and after the program's implementation. Key outcomes were student participation in the breakfast program, obesity, body-mass index (BMI), academic achievement, and school attendance.
In schools that offered the BIC program schoolwide, rather than just in some classrooms, student participation rates increased by 30.2%.
The investigators found no link with obesity or BMI in schools that offered the program in all classrooms.
However, Corcoran and colleagues also found no evidence that the BIC program helped math or reading test scores. "The only statistically significant effect we observe is for middle school math, for schools with at least 25 percent of classrooms covered (but not full BIC), a positive 0.007 SD per 100 days (P<0.05). However, a large sample and multiple models can be expected to produce some statistically significant results," they wrote.
The study found no impact on attendance rates either. But attendance rates were already high in the schools studied, the investigators noted, averaging 92% in elementary schools and 88% in middle schools offering the BIC program.
"When looking at academic achievement and attendance, there are few added benefits of having breakfast in the classroom beyond those already provided by free breakfast," Corcoran said. "The policy case for breakfast in the classroom will depend upon reductions in hunger and food insecurity for disadvantaged children, or its longer-term effects."
The study was funded by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development.
No researchers reported financial relationships with industry.
Wright reported no financial relationships with industry.
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