Health Education and Nutrition for Children

By analysing the environmental and social factors that have a say to the low health status of population groups, this should lead to more settings and methods in programme planning. Nutrition promotion and education cannot plainly change some factors, such as poverty, low income, employment, education, social impacts, disability or ethnicity; they must obtain impacts into account in the design, development and implementation of the programme. This will require them to move away from individual behaviour changes and consider in their planning environmental supports, organisation changes, developments and working together across different sectors and social networks.

Health education in schools is based on a approach in the classroom, using topics such as smoking, alcohol, physical activity, healthy eating, sexuality, relationships, safety, mental health etc. A health promoting school approach can provide holistic support for new work following the curriculum. I.e. a curriculum about healthy eating and lifestyle can be supported by children being involved by; ensuring healthy food is available at all times, include vending machines this will help the children to feel more independent as they will be doing things by themselves, ensuring fresh water is available at all times, including physical activities, making links so the children are aware of different issues I.e. mental and emotional health, cultural role of food, etc.

The evidence that has been found about health benefits for children of hand washing and drinking clean water is strong. Although, there are restricted value outcomes of the initiatives taken by schools to promote healthy hygiene. The data found shows that in developing countries well designed and implemented initiatives which have incorporated a whole-school approach involving the physical environment, links with the health sector and have appropriate policies and curriculum have improved school attendance rates and reduced illnesses, but have had minimal effects on satisfying children’s hygiene-related behaviours.

Initiatives and programmes that follow evidence based teaching practises and whole school approaches have been shown to frequently increase student knowledge about food and diet. However, changes in student eating behaviours have been less successful than it was thought to be as, girls tend to benefit more than boys, and some initiatives have reported a modest raise in vegetable and fruit intakes.

Physical activities initiatives in schools are more successful if they have a full approach e.g. establishing and maintaining appropriate physical environments, having the right resources. Daily physical activity at school has been found to improve children’s enthusiasm and has no negative effects on cognitive development, children gain more benefit from physical activity if they have a number of different opportunities to be active at regular times during the school day i.e. break and lunch times, p.e and dance lessons.