Offer and composition of meals for children in nursery schools.

This Bachelor's thesis focuses on nutrition of children in preschools. Here, children eat a mid-morning snack, lunch and an afternoon snack. This equals to 60% of their daily intake. Healthy development of children requires the food compliant with nutrition standards for preschool children. Hence, the Consumption Basket was introduced by the Decree No. 107/2005 Coll., on school meals. To facilitate menu creation, nutrient recommendations with frequency of meals were issued by the Ministry of Health. Submitted thesis pursues three objectives: To analyse whether the consumption basket of selected preschools meets requirements defined by the decree, to focus on the level of adherence of preschools to recommendations defined by the Ministry of Health and to reveal whether the energy value of randomly chosen four-day menus and their content of individual nutrients meet the needs of a child from a particular age group. The practical part processes four-week period's menus to observe whether the school canteen follows recommended frequency of meals. It also analyses resultant consumption baskets of selected canteens to reveal whether they follow the consumption basket content. And finally, it uses recipes and foodstuff types obtained from four randomly selected days of a particular month. Obtained data were processed in a Nutriservis program to learn whether the energy value of the menus and content of individual nutrients meet the needs of a preschool child. Results showed that two of the canteens did not meet the consumption basket criteria. They also showed the level of adherence of school canteens to the nutrient recommendations and defined room for improvement. Regarding capability of meals in preschools to meet the needs of preschool children, nutrient intake was revealed to be higher - sometimes even higher than overall daily intake. However, it is necessary to note that neither the exact amount of served food was considered nor the amount of leftovers was subtracted