The United States struggles with childhood obesity from the second grade upwards. Part of the problem identified is unhealthy food, served at home, at food outlets, and at school. A second problem is lack of practical knowledge of what constitutes health and delicious food and how to prepare it.
Japan has been addressing these problems for several decades with remarkable results. Childhood obesity rates in Japan are among the lowest in the world, declining for the last six years, and there is almost no malnutrition in children. In addition, Japanese live on average to 83 years of age, the highest in the world, according to the World Health Organization. How have they accomplished this?
Part of the answer lies in the culture, part of the answer is in education, and part of the answer is a collective decision to make healthy and delicious food at mealtime in school a priority for everyone.
Part of the success is in the food itself. The food served is like the food served at home, not like at a sporting event – which means the parents and the culture are taken into account. The meals are made from scratch on-site – which means no prepared, frozen, reheated food. The menu is balanced in type and nutrients: rice, vegetables, fish, and soups – just like at home. Thus the food is nutritious, familiar, and relatively inexpensive since it is all locally grown.
How do the schools and the government function? Healthy and delicious school lunch menus have been a priority for the Japanese government since the end of World War II. While the government has set minimal nutritional guidelines, except for educational efforts, it intervenes minimally in the local school planning.
Each school district has a nutritionist who plans the school menus and who is heavily involved in the educational efforts at school. Additionally, the schools allow no vending machines in the school and children in grade school cannot bring food from home or from outside.
How do the children react? They make charts and posters of healthy dream lunch menus to hang on the walls, based on their nutritional education. They wear white caps and lab coats and take turns serving the food to each other, eating in their classrooms communally, everyone with the same food.
In support of these efforts, the parents pay about $3 per meal to subsidize the lunch program at school and they teach their children to eat the food they are served.
As a result, the children quickly learn to accept the education, the nutrition, and the foods. In fact, the food is so popular that children frequently ask for the same food at home, fostering the production of full color cookbooks published by the local school districts.
What’s the take-home message for the United States or for your local situation? The secret to good nutrition in school meals is cooperation between the parents, the schools, and the government.
For US public school systems, this is hard because of cultural diversity and general lack of cooperation between parents and schools. But in private school settings with a more homogeneous attitude toward the importance of nutrition and a greater control of class room educational opportunities, these lessons could be easily adopted and implemented. How important is nutrition for your child?