The Health | April, 2019
22
junior
What are
your kids
eating in
school?
We should be more mindful of
the things our kids eat at school
By Reenasri Sekaran
A
ccording to recent statistics, Malay-
sians are found to be the most obese
in Asia, as many of us suffer from poor
nutrition. And although we tend to look
at the adults more, we should also be
looking at our children, as bad eating
habit in children is a more troublesome matter to tackle.
The rise and fall of school lunches
Head to your nearest primary and secondary school
canteen and you’d find an assortment of fried foods,
noodles caked with sauces and sugary drinks. Plus with
the added fact that the fried foods are sold at such a
cheap price, why wouldn’t it be the first option for
hungry school children?
Even if the school attempts to cut its sugary and
fried fix, what’s stopping our kids from getting it from
the vendors just outside of school? The lure of a quick
sugary treat after an exhausting day at school is simply
too good to skip.
Just like learning academically, making healthy
food choices is a learned behaviour which can be easier
adapted if introduced at a young age. Children have
little influence or control over what they eat, thus it
is important to positively impact them early to shape
their eating patterns and preferences later on in life.
Japanese School Lunch Day One: When
you mix the vegetables, rice, and meat
from this dish (which most kids do), it’s like
eating the Korean dish, Bibimbap.
Dishing out healthier options
Some countries have been proactive in providing better
food for kids.
“Japan’s standpoint is that school lunches are a part
of education, and one must not break from it,” said
Masahiro Oji in 2013, a government director of school
health education. School lunches in Japan usually con-
sists of options like tofu with meat sauce on rice, paired
with a salad, apple, and carton of milk. It’s no surprise
that Japan’s life expectancy is among the highest in
the world, while its rate of obesity is well below the
global average.
By implementing such programmes alongside
parents being aware of what their kids are consum-
ing, their children’s diet contain a healthy amount
of nutrients and the different benefits of consuming
wholesome food.
Better opportunity arises
Fortunately, Malaysia’s Prime Minister Tun Dr
Mahathir Mohamad had recently announced that
the government will use revenue collected from the
upcoming sugar tax to fund a programme to provide
free healthy breakfasts for primary school students in
Malaysia.
The Prime Minister said that revenue collected from
the sugar tax would be channelled to the proposed
programme from next year. “We want our kids to
be strong and healthy to perform in school,” said Dr
Mahathir during his keynote address at Invest Malaysia
2019. — The Health
Eating in at the breakfast club
N
o, we are not talking about John Hughes’s iconic teen
movie in 1985. Found often in the United Kingdom,
a school breakfast club is a provision for children to
eat a healthy breakfast in a safe environment before their
first class.
In the UK, breakfast clubs were introduced in the 90’s,
driven not just by concern for children›s nutrition but
by parental demand for a supervised place to leave their
children in the early morning. The club, which provides the
children with a nutritious breakfast of cereal, juice, toast and
fruit, opens at 8.30am and finishes just before 9am, when
classes begin.
Much more than toast and cereal
Breakfast
clubs are
often
organised in
schools in the
UK.
Just recently, a primary school in Northwich, England is
trialling the National School Breakfast Programme – a new
initiative funded by the government’s sugar tax. Children
are welcome at the school from 7.45am to enjoy a healthy
breakfast and stimulating activities, setting them up for
the school day. It was found that free breakfasts provided
at schools before the start of teaching, and found strong
improvements in writing, reading and maths for pupils in
year two, aged six and seven.
American multinational food-manufacturing company,
Kellogg’s, is doubling the number of grants it offers to
school breakfast clubs across the UK. The scheme will help
to provide breakfast to more than 600 UK schools in the
communities that need them the most.
Will Malaysia’s sugar tax implementation lead to our very
first breakfast club? We surely hope so. — The Health