Students’ Preferences of Lunchroom Food and How it Impacts Academic Performance

Tudor Chicos et al.
Wed, 29 Apr 2026 15:30:00 PDT

Our study examines how students feel about the food options available in a school lunchroom and the nutritional quality of those options. Since proper nutrition is key for concentration, academic success, and the overall development of a school’s students, our project researches the academic outcome of the provided food and the students’ choices in it. This project is backed by UNSDG goal 3, which prioritizes good health and well-being. First, we will use a questionnaire to track what foods are preferred by students. This will give us a consensus of what people like about lunchroom food and what people generally eat there. This is very important because having an understanding of what students feel about lunch food will influence how often they eat there. Next, we will analyze the menus of several schools to see how healthy they are. We will focus on how many of the food groups each food has, along with several underlying factors such as calories, gluten, and portions. We will cross-reference these with recommendations for high school students to see how well the general population of high schools are doing in providing proper nutrition. Our study will additionally look at what students generally choose to eat for lunch, as we can then see trends with nutritional food consumption and favorability with the students. Finally, we will show the trends in our data and how it compares with proper eating habits as a result of popular food consumption, which directly influences academic performance factors such as focus, memory, energy, and classroom engagement, key areas that are crucial in a scholarly environment. As a result, we can see what students in a high school environment like to eat and how healthy their meal is, and this info can be sent to other high schools so that they can fix or renovate their menu to be more approachable for their students and healthier for them too.