Citation
(2009), "Advances in school healthy eating", Nutrition & Food Science, Vol. 39 No. 1. https://doi.org/10.1108/nfs.2009.01739aab.006
Publisher
:Emerald Group Publishing Limited
Copyright © 2009, Emerald Group Publishing Limited
Advances in school healthy eating
Article Type: Food facts From: Nutrition & Food Science, Volume 39, Issue 1
The culmination of a year’s independent research has found that teachers, parents and pupils are benefiting from a dedicated healthy eating and physical exercise programme.
More than half of the children involved in the research said they were eating more healthily as a result of the PhunkyFoods programme, which has been adopted by more than 500 schools across England.
The National Foundation for Educational Research (NFER), an internationally regarded charity that has been at the forefront of independent educational research for 60 years and regularly contributes to government policy, studied the impact of PhunkyFoods in 18 primary schools across the country between November 2007 and September 2008:
- •
Parents and teachers saw improvements in the knowledge, awareness, attitudes and behaviour towards exercise and healthy eating.
- •
More than half of children said they ate more healthily as a result.
- •
More than half of children demonstrated that they had improved their understanding of why healthy eating was important.
- •
The number of pupils who could provide a sophisticated response about what “balance” meant to them in diet doubled.
These findings were based on interviews with more than 100 pupils, teachers and parents.
The NFER concluded that PhunkyFoods is “Popular with the whole school community and clearly helps expand, embed and enhance health-related teaching, through increasing school staff competence and confidence, complementing other initiatives and positively impacting on pupil knowledge, attitudes and behaviour.”