Children's Nutrition Action Plan - The Food Commission

Jeanette Longfield
Sustain: The alliance for better food and farming
We often say that children’s diets are bad, and that they will lead to poor health, but how
good is our evidence for this?
Many public health initiatives focus on children’s nutrition, based on a number of
assumptions, including:
• That chronic diseases such as diabetes and heart disease in adult life are first established
through childhood eating habits;
• That childhood eating habits will pre-determine adult eating habits;
• That educational influences such as nutrition education and learning cooking skills will
encourage healthy eating in adult life;
• That changing children’s eating behaviour will also affect family food choices for the
better.
Evidence to support these assumptions is sometimes shaky, and as campaigners for better
public health we should work to consolidate the best evidence and the most effective
arguments. With a food industry adamant that sugary, fatty and salty foods are not at the root
of bad health, we need to ensure that our arguments are robust.
The best evidence for focusing on children’s diets is that the typical diet of UK children is
bad for dental health. There is also good evidence for diet being linked with the rising rates of
obesity in children.
But we should not forget that children are a subset of the population, and that the population
as a whole is eating an unhealthy diet. Although evidence seems to suggest that children are
eating the worst diets of all, a normal distribution curve of UK diets indicates that policy
measures to shift the curve must be taken with the entire population, not just parts of it. By
focusing too much on children, we risk giving adults the impression that health is preordained
by dietary habits in earlier life, and this may lead them to ‘give up trying’.
Whole population and specific groups – shifting the distribution curve
Small proportion
of people with
even worse than
average diet
Majority of people with
unhealthy diet
Small proportion of
people with healthy
diet
Normal distribution curve showing current state of average UK diet
The Children’s Nutrition Action Plan, published by The Food Commission
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