ArticleSSM - population health2022
The impacts of free school lunch policies on adolescent BMI and mental health: Evidence from a natural experiment in South Korea.
Article in SSM - population health, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 13 papers.
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Who cites it
13 citing papers in PubMed, 22 citations in OpenAlex.
- Impacts of Global School Feeding Programmes on Children's Health and Wellbeing Outcomes: A Scoping Review.BMJ open · 2025Article
- Unraveling Future Trends in Free School Lunch and Nutrition: Global Insights for Indonesia from Bibliometric Approach and Critical Review.Nutrients · 2025Review
- Shadows in the Air: Mental health vulnerabilities under PM10 and PM2.5, before and after COVID-19.SSM - population health · 2025Article
- School-Provided Meals and the Prevention of Childhood Obesity: A Small part of a Very Important Story.Current obesity reports · 2025Review
- School Lunch and Body Size in Japanese Junior High School Students: The Japanese National Health and Nutrition Survey.Nutrients · 2025Article
- A central role of nutrition in cognitive function among primary school children: a cross-sectional analysis.BMC nutrition · 2025Article
- Free school meals and educational outcomes: evidence from China's Nutrition Improvement Program.Frontiers in public health · 2025Article
- Leveraging the science of early life predictability to inform policies promoting child health.Developmental cognitive neuroscience · 2024Review
- Impact of Covid-19 lockdowns on the anthropometric development in primary school children in the Rhein-Neckar Region, Germany.BMC nutrition · 2024Article
- Universal Free School Meals Policy and Childhood Obesity.Pediatrics · 2024Article
- Does the integration of urban and rural health insurance influence the functional limitations of the middle-aged and elderly in rural China?SSM - population health · 2023Article
- Article
- Discrete-time Survival Analysis of Risk Factors for Early Menarche in Korean Schoolgirls.Journal of preventive medicine and public health = Yebang Uihakhoe chi · 2023Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
2 authors at 2 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
In spring 2015, the South Korean province of South Gyeongsang stopped providing free school lunches to primary and secondary school students while large portions of schools in other provinces continued to provide free lunches at school. After the provincial government faced strong opposition, South Gyeongsang reintroduced the free-school-lunch program the very next year. Using a difference-in-differences design, we exploit these policy changes to evaluate their impact on students' body mass index (BMI) and on a measure related to students' mental health status (MH). Our results show that the abolishment of free school lunches harmed (female) underweight students by causing additional weight losses of about 4.5 percent whereas the reintroduction of free school lunches led to an average weight loss of 2.1 percent among overweight students (both male and female). Moreover, the school lunch policy changes had significant impacts on our MH measure: crying without any reason increased when the free-school-lunch policy was abolished and it decreased when the policy was reintroduced. The results are of great interest to decision makers: introducing free school lunches helps to achieve healthier weights and decreases crying without any reason and as a result, benefits student welfare. Free-school-lunch policies, therefore, may provide simple and inexpensive means to improve the health and welfare of students.
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