Exploring Children's Perspectives on Nutrition

INSIGHTS FROM A THOUGHT-PROVOKING DISCUSSION

by Anya Bell, Menu Development Manager, Libelle Group

Recently I was invited to kōrero with some 11 and 12 year olds to explore their working theories on nutrition. We opened by unpacking what ‘healthy’ means. I was interested to know what their prior knowledge was. What I noticed was their curiosity and excitement as they were all able to enter into this discussion. The ākonga immediately offered suggestions. ‘Good for the body’ and ‘fruit and vegetables’ were the most popular, someone mentioned ‘balanced’ but sounded very unsure of what they meant by that. Their enthusiasm faded as they ran out of more detail.

Our focus group moved onto describing what ‘healthy’ looked like. Can you tell by looking at someone if they are healthy or not? Immediately someone said ‘skinny’, but this was quickly rebuffed by another student who said that wasn’t necessarily the case. For the next few minutes, there was heated discussion about what healthy looked like.

​Our discussion then moved to how we can know if a food is ‘healthy’ or ‘not healthy’. This was the core part of our group session as it led to a practical learning of the strategies we have available to us such as the ingredients label, allergens, the nutrition information panel (NIP), and the Health Star Rating (HSR). The ākonga were interested to know why fruit and vegetables did not have nutrition labels!

While this knowledge is a great tool to have in their toolbox, I wondered about our role as supporting adults in each child’s eating dynamic. This does sound rather a mouthful of words, but when I refer to best practice for feeding theory by Ellyn Satter, she talks about the trust relationship. A child intrinsically trusts that the adults in their lives are feeding them the foods needed to nourish their body and mind. Through the natural development process of growing from infant through to adolescent and young adult, a child learns how to eat, what to eat and how to procure and prepare these foods for themselves, ready for when they leave home and start caring for themselves, and later on perhaps for a family of their own. Along this journey, they are learning value of food, social context of food and eating, where food comes from, how it gets to our plate and the importance of nourishing the sources of our food. Children don’t understand the ‘health’ value of food – the cognitive processing of this information is too abstract. Their food preferences are built from positive social experiences with taste and eating.

This certainly confuses things. Children see food. They cannot see nutrition. Balanced eating and eating variety are abstract concepts but children are concrete learners and they like to learn through physical senses. They don’t select food based on their ‘health benefits’. So is there value in teaching children about food, rather than nutrition? Read more here.

Meanwhile, my focus group has moved on to a practical exercise where they are designing food packaging and I leave them to it. Feedback on my part in this discussion was that it made them think about things they usually wouldn’t think about. What about you? Does this make you rethink how you will talk to your children about food and eating?