Schools in Shanghai are now required to have at least one professional nutritionist in their canteens, officials with the Shanghai Education Commission said yesterday.

 

The nutritionist program, which is part of the city's three-year healthy campus plan, will offer training courses for school canteen staff on balanced, sensible cooking and how to prevent malnutrition.

 

Nutritionists will be responsible for designing students' lunch menus and controlling cooking quality and calorie intake.

 

Commission officials said they planned to have professional nutritionists in at least half of the 1,629 local school canteens by next year. The coverage is expected to reach 80 percent by 2008.

 

"We are requesting local schools to attach great importance to students' lunch quality and understand that the nutrition problem is an equally important issue as food safety," said Liu Xiangrui, vice director of the commission's physical, health and art education division.

 

The request came after a recent survey suggested that local students were not eating proper meals.

 

Earlier this year, researchers with Shanghai Jiao Tong University's medical school surveyed 3,325 primary and middle school students, aged between seven and 15, about their eating habits.

 

More than 70 percent of the students surveyed were reported to have an unbalanced diet, favoring meat and fried foods over vegetables and fruit.

 

The situation was even more serious among girls and younger pupils.

 

The survey reported that less than 40 percent of students are drinking milk every day.

 

The milk figure drops to below 20 percent among children in the city's suburban districts.

 

"Unbalanced dietary structure will easily lead to malnutrition and harm children's health," said Cai Meiqin, researcher at Jiao Tong's Nutrition Research Office and the survey program leader.

 

"It deserves higher attention from both parents and schools."

 

(Shanghai Daily December 27, 2006)