Knowledge and attitudes towards healthy eating and physical activity:

Section two: children and young people
This section refers to data on children and young people. There are fewer sources of
data available relating to children than adults. A range of age groups was sampled by
the different surveys, and this may impact on responses.
a. Knowledge, beliefs and self-perceptions relating to diet
This section summarises available data relating to:
• children and young people’s knowledge and understanding of what
constitutes a healthy diet and appraisal of their own diet
• factors influencing healthy eating in school
Key points
• The majority of children and young people consider their diet to be
healthy.
• When asked whether or not they have a healthy diet, children and young
people tend to base their answer on their fruit and vegetable consumption.
• 76% of children in school years 6, 8 and 10 say the information available to
them about healthy eating is good enough.
i. Knowledge and understanding of what constitutes a healthy diet
The Sodexho School Meals and Lifestyles Survey 2005 b asked a sample of children and
young people aged 5 to 7 years and 8 to 16 years how healthy they believe their diets
to be. The majority thought that their diet was ‘quite healthy’ (56% of 5 to 7 year olds;
54% of 8 to 16 year olds) or ‘very healthy’ (18% of 5 to 7 year olds; 16% of 8 to 16 year
olds). In contrast, only 1% of 5 to 7 year olds and 2% of 8 to 16 year olds thought that
their diets were ‘not at all healthy’. The largest difference between the age groups
was seen in those who said their diets were ‘not very healthy’ (6% of 5 to 7 year olds
and 18% of 8 to 16 year olds). These results are shown in Figure 10.
b The data reported here are from the Sodexho report on the survey, where the number of respondents is not provided.
Therefore it was not possible to calculate confidence intervals.
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