The nutrition improvement plan, which was introduced in 2011 to help pupils in poor regions improve their nutrition with government-sponsored lunches, will be rolled out nationwide, the State Council, China's Cabinet, said on Nov 15.

The plan is aimed at helping pupils from poor regions get enough nourishment so that their academic performance and health don't suffer because of the lack of nutrition.

Over the past five years, the nutrition improvement plan has been piloted in about 137,000 primary and secondary schools across the country and more than 33.6 million pupils have received free lunches. The plan will be enlarged to cover all poor counties.

As a comparison, the UN helps provide free lunches for 17 million pupils in 67 nations worldwide, and officials from UN World Food Programme said they expect to learn from the experiences of China.

At a recent seminar held in Beijing on the issue, Hu Xiaoqi, a researcher on children's nutrition at the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, outlined the benefits of the free lunches on students' health and said more attention should be paid to giving teachers in poor regions training on nutrition and its role in kids' healthy development.