Universal Meals: A Novel Program to Provide Healthful Nutrition to Diverse Communities

Healthcare professionals recommending dietary changes to patients often find that institutional settings—businesses, universities, long-term care facilities, correctional institutions, among others—may not provide the healthful foods that healthcare professionals recommend. Moreover, such institutions encounter an increasing diversity of dietary restrictions, based on allergies, intolerances, religious mandates, or other reasons, that may be challenging to satisfy. To address these issues, experts in health, dietetics, culinary arts, religion, and ethics developed a simple set of guidelines that aim to meet the widest possible range of dietary needs. Three culinary teams then used these guidelines to create “Universal Meals”—simple recipes that were then adapted to larger production sizes for institutional use. The healthfulness of representative sets of meals drawn from these recipes was assessed using the Alternative Healthy Eating Index-2010 and found to be superior to that of a meal pattern based on National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey data.