What should we be teaching children about healthy eating?

By nutritionist Jennifer Nash

How we choose to raise our children will always be a contentious topic. How we choose to feed our children equally so. But what about how we teach children about food, health and healthy eating? Surely this is pretty black and white – eat your greens and sugar is bad, right?

Actually, there’s way more to it than this when it comes to teaching children about nutrition, diet and health – let’s get into it.

Firstly, we’re a body image organisation, why are we talking about food?

How we talk about food (and movement, health and bodies in general) can have a huge impact on how children and young people think and feel about their bodies and the bodies of those around them.

Our focus is helping kids have a healthy relationship with their bodies. We know that negative body image has been linked with having an unhealthy relationship with food, such as disordered eating or even an eating disorder[1]. And conversely, positive body image is associated with greater engagement in health-promoting behaviours, such as eating a varied and balance diet[2]. So we’re invested in helping children foster a healthy relationship with food, in the sense that it is strongly connected with working towards positive body image[3],[4].

Diet culture likes to tell us there is a particular way to eat to in order to be healthy and look a certain way. It moralises and demonises foods and, let’s be honest, it ends up leaving us confused and frankly overwhelmed about what we ‘should’ or ‘shouldn’t’ be eating.

Many of us are onboard with dismantling diet culture for the next generation in order that they might avoid being bombarded with the thin-ideal or forever be confused about whether a bagel really does equal four slices of bread. What many don’t realise, however, is how diet culture has crept into children’s nutrition education – and some of the damage it is doing there. The focus in this piece is on nutrition education for primary school ages, but there is no doubt that diet culture has got its teeth into nutrition education across the education system, from primary school through to university (that’s one for another time).

Current healthy eating lessons for children

If you take a look at some popular healthy eating teaching resources out there you might start to spot it. Many of the worksheets we came across while researching this project ask five-year-olds to sort foods into ‘healthy’ or ‘unhealthy’ categories, or get seven-year-olds to count sugar cubes in foods to figure out how many minutes of exercise they’d need to do to burn it off, or start keeping food diaries.

These activities have their roots in diet culture, anti-fat bias and weight stigma. When you think about it, they are not actually teaching children about food – where it comes from, how to cook and prepare it, differences in our ways of eating, the cultural significance of food – but instead trying to get young children to grasp (through a diet-culture lens), the nuanced and complex topic of health and its relationship to food, something that adults have a hard job figuring out, and even health professionals and scientists continue to debate.  

What does the science say about nutrition education?

Something to highlight here is that research into children’s cognitive development suggests typical nutrition messages around healthy eating can be confusing and developmentally inappropriate for children[5]. Many nutrition terms and messages are abstract concepts beyond the comprehension of young children, who think in concrete, black-and-white ways and learn better through embodied experiences. Some nutrition messages can even be fear-inducing for young children – for example, they can start to worry they will get physically sick from eating the ‘wrong’ foods.

Interestingly, research suggests that when we use persuasion tactics which present a food to young children as instrumental (i.e. ‘this food makes you strong’), children actually consume less of it[6]. Let’s also remind ourselves that young children are not responsible for sourcing or preparing their food and meals, so it is improper to place responsibility on them at this young age to choose to eat in a particular, ‘healthy’ way[7].

What should we be teaching children about healthy eating then?

We’re not saying what children eat isn’t important – we’re adding into the mix that how children eat is important too. Fostering a healthy relationship with food from a young age prioritises a lifelong ability to properly nourish your body in the way that it needs. Rather than obsessing about how many pieces of broccoli an eight-year-old ate yesterday, we are building positive eating habits that can last a lifetime. If we teach children how to have a healthy relationship with food – and that’s all foods – then the chances are they will become adults who also have a healthy relationship with food.  

We like to take a food-positive approach to teaching healthy eating which seeks to counteract the harmful messages children often hear around food and their bodies, particularly those rooted in diet culture. It reclaims the term ‘healthy eating’ with the mantra ‘healthy eating means having a healthy relationship with food’.

We should be educating children about food and the multiple roles it plays in our lives, including the fact that food is meant to be enjoyed! Rather than create hierarchies around food, children should understand that all foods can and should be enjoyed as part of their diet. Labelling food as ‘good’ or ‘bad’ (and ‘healthy’ and ‘unhealthy’) can create guilt and anxiety around eating and introduces unwanted and false dichotomies around food that can lead to unhealthy eating behaviours and attitudes.

A food-positive approach to healthy eating adopts a joined-up strategy with teaching on mental wellbeing, so that the two support rather than undermine one another, and ultimately children learn health-promoting behaviours for their physical and mental health.

Food education is more than understanding ‘healthy eating’ – it should broaden children’s understanding of food, diet and health, helping them to appreciate the wide range of factors involved in diet, from likes/dislikes to cultural preference, as well as social and environmental issues such as food insecurity and sustainability.

If you’re on board with teaching children about food in this way, check out our food-positive healthy eating schemes of work for Key Stage 1 and Key Stage 2.

Teachers are incredible humans doing a very difficult job. That’s why we want to help! Our food-positive healthy eating scheme of work offers five age-appropriate lessons on the topic of food, nutrition and its connection to positive body image, whilst meeting national curriculum requirements, along with a sixth bonus lesson in the KS2 scheme.

Help children understand the multiple roles food plays in our lives, grasp basic concepts of nutrition and how food is used by the body, and learn about implementing healthy behaviours that foster a positive relationship with food and our bodies.

References:

[1] Neumark-Sztainer et al. (2006) Does body satisfaction matter? Five-year longitudinal associations between body satisfaction and health behaviors in adolescent females and males. Journal of Adolescent Health, 39(12), pp.244-251.

[2] Frisen, A. & Homqvist, K. (2010) What characterizes early adolescents with a positive body image? A qualitative investigation of Swedish girls and boys. Body Image, 7(3), pp.205-212.

[3] Davison et al. (2003) A longitudinal examination of patterns in girls’ weight concerns and body dissatisfaction from ages 5 to 9 years. International Journal of Eating Disorders, 33(3), pp.320-332. 

[4] Damiano et al. (2015) Dietary restraint of 5-year-old girls: Associations with internalization of the thin ideal and maternal, media and peer influences. International Journal of Eating Disorders, 48(8), pp.1166-1169. 

[5] Baskale, H. et al. (2009) Use of Piaget’s theory in preschool nutrition education. Rev. Nutr. 22 (6) pp.905-917.

[6] Maimaran, M. & Fishbach, A. (2014) If it’s useful and you know it, do you eat? Preschoolers refrain from instrumental food. Journal of Consumer Research, 41(3), pp.642-655.

[7] Lytle et al. (1997) Children’s interpretation of nutrition messages. Journal of Nutrition Education, 29(3), pp.128-136.