Nutrition Literacy in Schools

Many people these day especially children suffer with Malnutrition. Nutrition plays an important role in the health of every individual. Children and adolescents now-a-days are habituated to unhealthy life styles like eating junk foods, foods with excess oil and cholestrol content. It is requisite to every children to know about nutrition from early stages of life so that they can adapt for a healthy lifestyle.  

Promoting nutrition literacy in schools is crucial due to the rise in unhealthy lifestyles, which includes poor dietary choices and sedentary habits; educating children and young adults about good nutrition lays the foundation for lifelong health, reducing the risk of chronic diseases like obesity, diabetes, and heart disease.

Nutrition education serves as a powerful preventive measure, directly addressing health issues linked to poor dietary choices such as excessive consumption of sugary drinks and processed foods, by imparting knowledge about balanced diets, portion control, and the importance of fruits and vegetables.

Furthermore, proper nutrition is associated with improved cognitive function and academic performance, potentially opening doors to better future educational and career opportunities for students.

By teaching nutrition in schools, we can also contribute to reducing health disparities, as children from disadvantaged backgrounds often lack access to nutritious foods; nutrition literacy empowers them to make healthier choices, potentially narrowing health inequalities in society.

Moreover, early exposure to nutrition education fosters the development of healthy eating habits, as children learn the nutritional value of foods, making them more inclined to choose healthier options and avoid excessive consumption of unhealthy foods.

REFERENCE

1-Story, M., Nanney, M. S., & Schwartz, M. B. (2009). Schools and Obesity prevention: Creating school environments and policies to promote healthy eating and physical activity. Milbank Quarterly, 87(1), 71–100.  //doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-0009.2009.00548.x

2-Nutrition education: linking research, theory, and practice. (2008). PubMed.  //pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18296331/

Nutrition literacy refers to a person's ability to receive, process, and comprehend fundamental dietetic information and services in order to make appropriate dietary choices. It comprises comprehending dietary ideas as well as the ability to interpret, assess, and apply nutrition information, i.e., being aware of nutrients and their impact on health. It refers to a person's ability to gather, analyse, and apply dietary information from multiple sources. Nutrition literacy also entails understanding how foods are metabolised, how they affect health, and how to apply this knowledge to make wise decisions. This study tackles the growing acknowledgement of the relevance of food and nutrition literacy while emphasising the scarcity of research in this area, notably the gap between research and practise. 

//www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10378922/

 A healthy diet is crucial for physical development, growth, and maintaining a healthy weight throughout life. Childhood food habits have been identified as a major contribution to the development of preventable lifestyle diseases such as overweight and obesity, as well as CVD (1).

Food literacy is a relatively new and emerging idea that refers to a set of skills and knowledge related to food, how it is used, and everyday dietary behaviors linked with healthy eating. Investigating the implementation and effectiveness of school-based nutrition promotion programs using a health-promoting schools approach has revealed that the school environment, through home economics, can provide an ideal setting for the teaching and practice of food literacy skills and healthy dietary behavior. Food literacy in the school setting should focus on providing teachers with more assistance and adequate training in nutritional knowledge, a universal definition, and evaluation methods and tools to assess all aspects of food literacy. food literacy can be taught in the secondary-school setting objectives are:

1. Identify the impact of food literacy initiatives in secondary schools.
2. Investigate the attitudes and views of adolescents toward food literacy programs and the issue of home economics.
3. Investigate the viewpoints of home economics teachers on food literacy programs and the topic of home economics (2).

Reference:

1. Victora G Nutrition in early life: a global priority. Lancet 374, 1123–1125.

2. Nasrin Omidvar, Azam Doustmohammadian, Elham Shakibazadeh, Clark, Maryam Sadat Kasaii, & Maryam Hajigholam Saryazdi. (2022). Effects of school-based interventions on Food and Nutrition Literacy (FNLIT) in primary-school-age children: a systematic review. British Journal of Nutrition, 1–20. //doi.org/10.1017/s0007114522002811

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