IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/wbk/wbrwps/11208.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

An Apple a Day : The Impact of Healthier School Meals on Children in Jordan

Author

Listed:
  • Lombardini, Simone
  • Kondylis, Florence
  • Lerva, Benedetta
  • Heirman, Jonas
  • Khincha, Roshni
  • Uckat, Hannah Irmela

Abstract

Poor nutritional choices and unhealthy behaviors are considered responsible for the rise in childhood overweight and obesity and may reinforce each other, creating a vicious cycle. This paper studies a primary school intervention designed to break the cycle early in life by replacing date bars with calorie-equivalent meals lower in sugar and fat. Leveraging the randomized pilot of a menu change in Jordan’s national school feeding program, the study shows that children consuming the alternative meals spend 8 percent less money to buy processed snacks, are more physically active (0.1 standard deviation), and go to school one extra day per year.

Suggested Citation

  • Lombardini, Simone & Kondylis, Florence & Lerva, Benedetta & Heirman, Jonas & Khincha, Roshni & Uckat, Hannah Irmela, 2025. "An Apple a Day : The Impact of Healthier School Meals on Children in Jordan," Policy Research Working Paper Series 11208, The World Bank.
    • Handle: RePEc:wbk:wbrwps:11208
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/099850109052573815/pdf/IDU-d6a53fb6-4c5f-4a8a-87b0-0a37ccd5d68d.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:wbk:wbrwps:11208. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Roula I. Yazigi (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/dvewbus.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.