Today the arrangement of school meals is carried out by outsourcing companies, which are obliged to comply with the current federal and regional legal, regulatory, scientific and technical, organizational requirements. All these requirements should ensure that pupils are provided with proper meals that meet their needs for energy, essential nutrients, vitamins and minerals. A great number of Russian scientific and practical works are devoted to the optimization of school meals in terms of proteins, fats, vitamins, dietary fibre. Nevertheless, in some works performed by the staff of the K.G. Razumovsky Moscow State University of Technology and Management, when monitoring meals in educational institutions of some regions, it is noted that along with many violations in about 70% of the surveyed schools, menus do not meet the requirements of healthy nutrition.
This violation served as the rationale for the work, at the first stage of which the search for the most significant element was carried out, according to which the optimization of the menu of schoolchildren should be carried out. Analysis of scientific and technical information has shown that the most common nutritional diseases of Russians are associated with a deficiency of iron, iodine, calcium, magnesium, antioxidant elements (selenium, chromium, copper, zinc) [1].
Recently, medical publications have noted that the syndrome of "environmental sensitization" is significantly widespread, in some cases caused by an imbalance in the concentrations of macro-, micronutrients in the body, called in the medical literature microelementosis (ME), one of the consequences of which is a violation of the reproductive health of Russians of reproductive age [2]. Popova V.A. et al. analyzed publications on the leading role of zinc deficiency in the aetiology of impaired sexual development in children and the occurrence of infertility in men. This metal ensures control of gene expression during cell replication and differentiation. Zinc is an indispensable micro-element for the processes of spermatogenesis, on the one hand, and for the health of the fetus in the early stages of embryogenesis [2].