Acceptability and Satiety Evaluation of a Developed Nutritionally Balanced School Meal

Abstract

Five nutritionally designed school meals were developed in a form of pastes based on leguminous seeds (lentil, chick pea, and soya) mixed with dairy ingredients. All formulas contain groundnut, and few contained crushed nuts providing inclusions inside the prototypes to test acceptance. The products were fortified with essential minerals and vitamins following the DRI guideline for children. Developed meals were served as a breakfast meal to ~200 students (6-9 years juniors; 10-14 years seniors) of one of the Sudanese basic schools (Omdurman City) for 21 days to substitute a traditional breakfast meal boiled Pigeon pea colloquially called “Balila” served routinely to the students. This paper covers acceptability of favorable products behavioral responses of senior and junior students to four meal/subject interactions coverings temptation to finishing the whole meal, reason(s) for not finishing the whole meal, time needed to finish the meal, and degree of satiety the students feel during teaching hours.

Almost 95% of the senior students interacted positively with pastes based on lentil or chick pea finish the product as evidenced by the short time (<10 min) to finishing or stop taking the meal in ? 10 minutes. All past products provide satiety; senior students judged that lentil based paste(s) as the meal that secures full satiety during school hours. Unlike seniors, more than 95% of junior students finished more of the soy-based meal, one third of them took more time to finish lentil-based meal indicate that the results reflected satisfaction by taking less quantities from all products offered. Degree of satiety feeling among junior students fluctuated where >90% of them confirmed satisfactory degree of satiety compared to all products offered.