Adjustments have been made to relax school nutrition guidelines, allowing for fewer whole grains, fattier milk and more time to reduce sodium levels.

The changes will make little difference in the Tomah Area School District, said Jesse Bender, TASD director of Food Services.

The three main changes are a continuation on the freeze of the sodium reduction schedule and the option for schools to serve less than 50 percent of whole grains and up to one percent milk.

The adjustments will be effective beginning July 1 and, according to a memo from the United States Department of Agriculture, Food and Nutrition Service, the changes will assist schools in “overcoming challenges related to the school meals regulations implemented in 2012,” following the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act which was passed in 2010. The regulations were part of an Obama Administration push to make school meals healthier.

Bender said the changes are minor.

“They’ve been talked about a lot, except not a whole lot has really changed,” he said. “It might sound like a lot has changed, but nothing has really changed.”

Bender said the revisions are just a continuation of what exists now. When the regulation originally was enacted, sodium decrease was put on a timetable. That timetable is now frozen so more studies can be conducted.

“They froze them where they’re at,” he said. “Whether or not it continues to advance, or they keep it frozen, I have no idea. It’s kind of one of those things we could talk about it forever, but … nothing has changed.”

When regulations on whole grains were first implemented in 2012, over 50 percent of the grain products schools served had to be whole grain, Bender said. Then by the 2014-15 school year, the USDA wanted all grain products to be whole-grain rich, meaning all the grain products such as hamburger buns, pizza crust, pasta needed to be 51 percent or more whole grain.

The new adjustment allows schools to return to half of the grain products being whole grain rich and the other half not, Bender said.

Even if changes are eventually made, Bender said manufacturers haven’t created products to meet the adjustment in the regulations.

“They’ve spent since 2012 adjusting all of the products they provide to us to meet the federal regulations and then all of a sudden, with the snap of the fingers, we change the regulations,” he said. “They don’t change products that fast.”

If the school decides to implement some non-whole-grain rich products, it means adjustments in the menu so the school can continue to meet the regulations which stipulate that 51 percent or greater of the grain products served must be 100 percent whole grain, Bender said.

“There’s a complex balance of how do we do this in order to change,” he said. “It’s something that maybe in the future we’ll look at, but all the manufacturers haven’t caught up to that product change right now, so whether or not that happens will take a while.”

The last change give schools the option to serve up to one percent flavored milk. In 2012, all flavored milk, whether it be strawberry or chocolate, had to be skim.

Bender said flavored milk has always been a big topic of discussion with people battling back and forth about serving it. The majority of students, about 80 percent, take chocolate milk.

“The idea was that if the majority of them are taking that, let’s reduce and remove that one percent fat and make it skim, so essentially we’re putting less fat on the menu, so making it healthier, trying to provide that weekly average that we want,” he said. “We’ve been doing that now for six to seven years, and everyone’s gotten used to it, so I don’t see that as something of changing and going back to it. Everyone’s used to it, why change it at this point in time?”

If the school food service decides to include one percent milk, it would actually lead to visible changes in the food served, Bender said. The portions would be smaller because the milk would add roughly 12-14 calories to a meal.

“We have an average weekly allotment … of calories,” he said. “Some schools at certain weeks … are maxed out, meaning that we are offering the maximum amount of calories that we can to our menu. If you add in those 12 or so extra calories and we’re already maxed out, now you have to decrease the calories in order to add calories in.”

When the regulations were implemented in 2012, there was a small drop in school lunch participation, Bender said. However, he said participation is going back up.

“When you start providing something that people aren’t used to, they typically … are not going to eat it,” he said. “It’s changing that idea and educating people why we’re doing it and saying, ‘here, try this, you might like it.’ That’s the thing, everybody’s a professional in eating, we all know what we like and what we want. It’s trying to change that mindset.”