Children’s right to food education – tools for a more sustainable future

Children’s right to food education – tools for a more sustainable future was a one-day workshop arrangement in cooperation between between many organizations. Despite global poverty among children has been in decline for decades (Our world in data, 2019), the opposite holds true for malnutrition and its consequences: metabolic syndrome, including obesity, TD2, and Non-Alcoholic Fatty Liver Disease. But despite our adaptation to ASF and animal fat, schools in Finland do the opposite. The solution may be improved knowledge about child development.

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Children’s right to food education – tools for a more sustainable future was a one-day workshop arrangement in cooperation between Sapere, Department of Food and Nutrition at the University of Helsingfors, and Finnish Society for Food Education Rukku, financed by EIT Food, a branch of the European Institute of Innovation and Technology (EIT), which is a body of European Union.

Despite global poverty among children has been in decline for decades (Our world in data, 2019), the opposite holds true for malnutrition and its consequences: metabolic syndrome, including obesity, TD2, and Non-Alcoholic Fatty Liver Disease (NAFLD).

These welfare diseases are said to be caused by increasing consumption of processed and ultra-processed food (Hall et al. 2019).

This paradox is also true in Finland. According to researchers at Finnish Folkhälsan Research Center and Helsingfors University, child obesity in Finland is soaring (Roos, November 5, 2020). Obesity is associated with NAFLD (Sahota et al. 2020). Finnish news reports claim that ~100 000 Finnish children (~10 %) still live in poverty. To counteract this, during summers Helsingfors city uses tax money to distribute lunch for all kids up to 16 years of age. The ingredients are root vegetables with either meat, fish, or chicken, all in a broth. 

In schools, contrary to nutrition science (Astrup et al. 2020; Dehghan et al. 2019) they serve low-fat milk, and at least once a week they serve vegetable alternatives. The afternoon meal occasionally is apple cake with vanilla sauce or chocolate mousse.

The big questions is: What is sustainable food and What food are children entitled to?

4 million years ago, our ancestors abandoned the fruits & veggie diet they shared with the chimpanzees in favor of animal source foods rich in micronutrients like docosahexaenoic fatty acids, zinc, heme-iron, vitamin K2 to mention a few (Aiello & Wheeler, 1995; Mann, 2018; Thompson et al. 2019).

Consequently, nutrition science demonstrates that children still need animal source food to sustain physical and mental development (Adesogan et al. 2019; Balehegn et al. 2019). And even studies that are based on food questionnaires are pointing at inconsistencies:

"High availability of fruits and vegetables in the home did not seem to protect the children from the effect of the sugar-enriched foods" (Vepsäläinen, Korkalo, Mikkilä, Lehto, Ray, Nissinen, Skaffari, Fogelholm, Koivusilta, Roos and Erkkola, 2017, p. 1237).

The solution may be improved knowledge about child development is that early exposure (before the age of 4) will influence children's future perception and learning. For example, parents' conversation style explains the so-called 30 000 000 gap (Heart & Risley, 1995). Children's early practice of drawing human-like figurines is associated with school performance at the age of 10 (Arden et al. 2014). The same goes for food. Early olfactory perceptions of food will form memory traces that later in life will guide decision-making processes concerning dietary choice. Therefore, it's important that politicians and other decision-makers follow nutrition science to influence parents and schools to expose children's sensory systems to the food that opened the door for our species and are crucial to sustaining physical and mental health among children.

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This post was originally published on the University of Helsingofrs for my research project (2018-2021).