For many families, the football season has begun in earnest, and luckily there have been some stunning autumn Saturday mornings to be standing on the sidelines.
Last week, my son was lucky enough to be named player of the day. Upon seeing his certificate, I noted the sponsor’s enticements to buy their (food) product along the side of the certificate. This is a classic example of food and beverage companies trying to make a loyal customer out of my son. It resonates strongly with me, as a parent and a dietitian, especially given that yesterday was Jamie Oliver’s worldwide "Food Revolution Day", a worldwide healthy food-themed day in May every year. This year’s global theme was to raise awareness of food (and beverage) advertising to children (job done!).
Jamie Oliver has had a significant impact on raising the awareness of the need for changes in our environment to support our children’s health, by making healthier food choices easier, particularly in the United Kingdom and Canada.
Locally, there has been some really interesting research done by University of Otago researchers Louise Signal, Moira Smith and their colleagues in Wellington investigating the food marketing that Kiwi children aged 11-13 years are exposed to. They asked children to wear a camera that automatically took a photo every seven seconds, and looked at the images they were exposed to regarding food advertising. The advertisements were then coded as being for "healthy" or "unhealthy" foods based on whether the foods featured in the core food groups for children or not. The results were presented at the International Congress on Obesity last year. They found that the children were frequently exposed to unhealthy food marketing, via product packaging (picture the foods on display at your local dairy!), signs, merchandise, vending machines, TV, electronic media and instore marketing (as in supermarkets). The journey to and from school, and even at school, featured advertising of unhealthy foods to children. Most of the food marketing was for sugary drinks and snack foods. One particularly disturbing image was a fast-food branded basketball hoop in a school playground!
As a parent trying to encourage your own children to make healthier choices, it can feel as though you are fighting against processed-food companies clamouring for their attention and loyalty. As a sports dietitian, seeing the kinds of foods and beverages that are marketed around sport concern me, as they are invariably rich in energy and poor in nutrition. And children are as avid consumers of sports programming as their parents. Parents are old enough to know what food marketing is, but children aren’t. I have these discussions regularly with my children, pointing out who is trying to get their cash now! I implore every parent, grandparent, school and the wider community to do the same.
If you do want further advice and guidance on how to help your children and grandchildren be happy and healthy, seek the advice of an accredited practicing dietitian in the ‘Find a Dietitian’ section of the Dietitians New Zealand website (www.dietitians.org.nz/find-a-dietitian) . I also recommend the book Healthy Kids, Happy Lives. It was released just last week by Christchurch-based paediatric and sports dietitian Lea Stening, written by a Kiwi for Kiwis. We have a fantastic natural and healthy food supply here in New Zealand, and her book helps us understand how to make the best use of that.
Key things that we can do to encourage the good health of our children is to ensure that they eat breakfast at home every day (including fruit in that). Breakfast can be a great source of valuable nutrients in a child’s diet, especially if they choose well: Multigrain toast over white; a wholegrain cereal rather than a refined one that has carbohydrates and little else; although you can’t go past porridge for winter mornings!
Also encourage and support them to choose water or milk as the go-to drink rather than sugar-sweetened beverages such as soft drinks, energy drinks, sports drinks and fruit juices. The best way to do that is to not have sugar-sweetened beverages and nutrient-poor snacks in the house. Their taste-buds will adapt over time. It takes time, but it will happen! And they’ll have many more healthy years to eat that way too!
- Dr Kirsty Fairbairn is a health, wellness and sports dietitian at Invigorate Nutrition (www.invigoratenutrition.com), based at Eclipse Health, Wellness and Performance, Hanover St, Dunedin.
