Alimentação escolar para alunos com necessidades alimentares especiais: uma revisão de literatura

Abstract

Introduction: Special Dietary Needs are defined as those that occur at any stage of life, due to metabolic, physiological or pathological changes. These can generate dietary needs in the body. The National School Feeding Program “PNAE” is responsible for ensuring that students with special dietary needs have their right to school meals guaranteed. Objective: Discuss the guarantee of the right to adequate school meals for students with special dietary needs. Methodology: This study is a narrative literature review. The searches were carried out between february 2022 and may 2023, in the PubMed, Scopus and Google Scholar databases, complemented by a manual search in the bibliographic references of the selected works. Results: According to the Notebook of References on School Feeding for Students with Special Dietary Needs, an access flow is established for obtaining specialized school feeding, to meet ANAE. The first access can occur through spontaneous demand or identification of the ANAE by the school staff. A medical certificate is required by the school secretary and the nutritional diagnosis is carried out by the professional responsible for the School Health Program, and the specific diet is prepared by the school nutritionist. In most studies, it was noticed that the highest frequency of NAE present in the studies were food allergies and intolerances. A growing trend was also observed regarding the demand for specialized assistance to ANAE in public schools by the PNAE. Final considerations: It is the responsibility of the school and its actors to guarantee adequate school meals to the students with special dietary needs, inform about the possible routes for families to achieve the execution of the right. The lack of dialogue between the binomial family and school must be resolved. It is necessary to emphasize the need to obtain new studies on the subject of special food in schools, so that the subject is widely debated in order to solve these problems presented by the program as social agents.