Children's Nutrition Action Plan - The Food Commission

Children’s Nutrition Action Plan
Introduction
Food and nutrition policies are very much in the news these days. Food policies across
Europe have been the attention of much media concern, not just over agriculture and food
supply policies, BSE and dioxin in our food supplies, but in a quieter way there has been
mounting concern over European rates of heart disease and cancer, and rising incidence of
obesity. The World Health Organisation’s nutrition office for the European Region has
launched a four-year Food and Nutrition Action Plan which considers some of the issues we
look at in this document. The UK Department of Health has launched a series of policy
documents on public health policy which include food, diet and nutrition concerns. Also, the
recently launched UK Food Standards Agency is also developing a nutrition policy.
Children’s food is a key element of food policies for several good reasons. For a start, what
children eat not only affects their health at the time, but will make a significant difference to
their later health. For instance, after around the age of four, children who are overweight are
increasingly likely to be overweight or obese as adults. Before they reach their teens, children
can show the first signs of cardiovascular disease in the tissues of their arterial walls. By this
age, girls have already begun to lay down the nutritional base for their future pregnancies,
which in turn will affect the foetus and long-term health of their children. Nutrition in
childhood is therefore of importance for public health and the costs to our health services for
years to come.
Children are less able to make decisions about their own best interests than are well-informed
adults. The regulation of people’s free choice about the foods they eat is often attacked as
‘nannyism’ but this fails to apply when it comes to children. We acknowledge the need to
protect children through social controls – we ban the advertising of alcohol and tobacco to
children, and we prohibit children from buying drink and cigarettes until they are considered
old enough to know what they are doing. But with food, society has been less assertive and
has allowed the free-choice and free-market arguments to prevail.
This state of affairs is doing our children no good. The present document reviews some
of the main issues that concern children’s food and nutrition, and looks at possible
interventions or targets that might be constructed, to help us protect children’s health in the
future and improve what children are eating.
The Children’s Nutrition Action Plan, published by The Food Commission
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