With the improvement of living standards of citizens, the reasonable nutrition of three meals a day plays a very important role in the healthy growth of the students. Currently, the students being fastidious about food, partial for particular kinds of food or high on snacks, and not eating staple food are increasing day by day, so with the student number of structural malnutrition in student groups. In addition, due to excessive intake of high fat, high protein food and insufficient exercise, the incidence of obesity in current student group is rising year-by-year, planting a “time bomb” for cardiovascular and cerebrovascular diseases, high blood pressure, diabetes and other chronic diseases.

Students’ nutritional meals follow the principles of balance diet and rational nutrition, and are deployed in accordance with the nutrient content of different food and the nutritional need standard of different age students. The development of student’s nutritional lunch aims to safeguard the nutritional needs of students and healthy growth. The several pilot researches in our city have proved that this measure has achieved remarkable results such as reducing the rate of anemia among students, and effectively controlling the relevant risk factors for chronic diseases, .

Beijing Municipal Government places a high value on the lunch. Since 1999, they have begun the overall development of the lunch and listed it as an important element in food hygiene supervision and management. At present, there are nearly 60-plus designated distribution production units and more than 200 certified student canteens, jointly providing nutritional lunch for students. Every day, 260,000 students in primary and secondary school will enjoy the lunch in our city.

Beijing health administrative departments have done lots of work in nutrition guarantee, safety, as well as the publicity of the lunch.

First of all, in the aspect of nutrition, Beijing Municipal Health Bureau has carried out skills training in terms of nutritional basic knowledge, meal evaluation and cookbook design to more than 700 catering staff in our city; designed and developed the soft for meal evaluation and nutrition, which resolves such issues as the lack of nutritionist and difficulties in designing students’ nutritional cookbook.

Second, regarding the health and safety protection, since 2001, the Beijing Municipal Health Bureau has introduced a modern management system in students’ nutritional meal enterprises, set strict targets and norms in food raw materials, production processing and transportation sales, strengthened the health supervision and inspection to nutritional lunch distribution units, so that the case of students suffering from food poisoning due to the lunch has been clearly reduced.

In addition, to improve the recognition of parents and students to the lunch, Beijing Municipal Health Bureau has also cooperated with other departments of city government and the media and organized multiple garden parties, knowledge contests, popular science lectures and other activities to publicity the benefits of the lunch.

Here, we also remind parents to pay more attention to children’s breakfast and dinner even the students eat nutritional lunches in schools. The reasonable arrangements of the children’s three meals a day are very important for the healthy growth of children.