To provide this specificity, the committee noted that the current food packages provide widely varying proportions of required nutrients (between 5 and 400 percent of the Dietary Reference Intake ) and recommended food groups (between 0 and 177 percent of recommended intakes). Department of Agriculture's Food and Nutrition Service (USDA-FNS) adheres to a definition of the term “supplemental,” as described in Chapter 1, additional specificity was needed to guide the committee's actions.
The committee began by considering the meaning of the word supplemental, which is part of the full name of the WIC program, namely the Special Supplemental Food Program for Women, Infants, and Children. Determination of what a supplement to the diet should contain requires knowledge of participants' diets and how well their diets meet both nutrient requirements and intakes of recommended food groups, as described in Chapters 4 and 5. The WIC program is designed to supplement participants' diets without regard to whether these diets contain contributions from other federal (e.g., Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program ) or nonfederal programs (e.g., local food pantries). Chapter 10 presents the projected cost effects of the revised food packages over the long term. The changes proposed herein are evaluated against the committee's seven criteria in Chapter 9 and recommendations for implementation and research to evaluate the changes proposed are described in Chapter 11. The revised food packages based on all proposed changes are presented in Tables 6-1 and 6-2, 1 and specifications for WIC foods are presented in Table 6-4.
Finally, proposed changes to specifications for WIC-eligible foods are reviewed. Next, a brief discussion on proposed changes to food package III is presented. Women and children are covered first, followed by infants, because the rationale for many of the changes is similar for the foods in packages for women and children. Then, proposed changes to all food packages for women, infants, and children are reviewed along with the rationale for each change. The chapter begins with a review of the committee's overarching strategy for making food package changes.
In this chapter, the committee's recommendations for the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) food package changes are described.
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