Part of the SNAP-Ed Strategies & Interventions Toolkit.*
The School Nutrition Policy Initiative was a policy, systems, and environmental (PSE) change intervention designed to improve prevalence of childhood obesity in school age children in Philadelphia. Components of the SNPI included
- school self-assessment
- nutrition education
- nutrition policy
- social marketing
- parent outreach.
The goals of SNPI were to change the school food environment to promote healthy eating and increase physical activity and to provide teachers with training and tools to implement classroom-based nutrition education. The primary policy initiatives implemented were:
- Replacing all sugar-sweetened beverages in school vending machines and cafeterias with water, low-fat milk, and 100% milk.
- Creating a snack policy that restricts candy sales in schools and places guidelines on the snacks served and sold.
- Providing 10 hours of nutrition education training for teachers to support the integration of 50 hours of interdisciplinary nutrition education per year per classroom.
- Evaluated
* SNAP-Ed Strategies & Interventions: An Obesity Prevention Toolkit for States is a compilation of interventions. The toolkit was developed by USDA's Food and Nutrition Service, The Association of SNAP-Ed Nutrition Education Administrators (ASNNA), the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill's Center for Training and Research Translation (Center TRT), and the National Collaborative on Childhood Obesity Research (NCCOR), a partnership between the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the National Institutes for Health (NIH), the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and the USDA. It is designed and updated to help state SNAP-Ed administrative and implementing agencies identify evidence-based obesity prevention programs and policy, systems, and environmental (PSE) strategies and interventions to include in their SNAP-Ed plans.