Nutrition Education - or Lessons in Disordered Eating?

CW: This post discusses disordered eating and eating disorders and mentions specific disordered behaviours around food that may be distressing for some readers. If this feels like it would be upsetting for you to read right now, then please do what you need to to look after yourself.

Don’t skip breakfast. Cut down on saturated fat and sugar. Eat lots of fruit and veg. Get active and be a healthy weight. Eat more fish (including a portion of oily fish). Base your meals on starchy carbohydrates. Don’t get thirsty. Eat less salt.

To those of you who have even stepped a toe into the heady world of dieting, the above list of imperatives will feel suspiciously familiar. Rules that can trip you up or catch you out at any moment. Segregation and moralisation of foods: fruit, veg and fish - good. Anything with saturated fat and sugar - bad. Foods that should be cut out, or, at least, restricted. A bandwagon to fall off of. And, ultimately, something to feel ashamed of for not doing ‘perfectly’.

But despite having all the hallmarks of a fad diet, these directives don’t come from a Big Diet Company, or even a Big Diet Company pretending not to be a Big Diet Company.

This is what your children are learning at school.

And yes, they are required to keep food diaries too.

They learn how many teaspoons of sugar are in their favourite drinks. They learn how many calories are in a Domino's pizza, and how much football, dancing, or swimming they need to do to ‘burn it off’. They are asked to compare what they eat to the Eatwell plate*, and to sign a healthy eating pledge to make sure they comply. They are taught how to rank cheese based on the amount of fat it contains per 100g. They are taught that body size is a personal choice and that if everyone were to move more and eat less they too could ‘be a healthy weight’, defying pretty much everything we know about weight science. They learn that single nutrients cause diseases - a reductionist and archaic view of nutrition. They learn what the ‘right’ foods to eat are based on whitewashed, Eurocentric ideals about food, demonizing things like white rice or fried plantain and keeping the great British pastime of colonization alive and well.

But most of all they learn to fear food, and to fear fatness even more. And all of this happens by the time they turn 11 years old.

And before you “not all teachers, not all schools” me.. 1) yes, obviously not and 2) let’s really dig deep as to where the defensiveness is coming from.

For those readers not in England, it might be helpful to have a primer on how the curriculum is set. The National Curriculum in England is divided into 5 Key Stages. Key Stage 1 and 2 cover infant and junior schools respectively - that’s Reception to Year 6, or ages 4-5 to around age 11 (this is where kids get weighed in schools). Key Stage 3, 4, and 5 cover secondary education - Year 7 to Year 13, or ages 12 up to 18. The way that the curriculum is structured means that nutrition education could show up in a number of places; PE, Science, and Cooking & Nutrition. Nutrition education isn’t actually mandatory until Key Stage 3 where most kids will receive it in their ‘Food’ class, interwoven with cooking pasta salad and pizza and learning basic knife skills. The degree kids will be exposed to nutrition education beyond Key Stage 3 will depend on which GCSE and A-levels they have chosen.

The National Curriculum is refreshingly straightforward in what is required to be taught to kids about nutrition. Let’s look at Key Stage 3 for instance: ‘understand and apply the principles of nutrition and health’. This is open to a fair amount of interpretation, and there are fantastic teachers (see: not all teachers!) some of whom you’ll meet in a minute, thinking creatively and expansively about what it means to teach the principles of ‘nutrition’ and ‘health’.

And then there’s this:

Aside from the obvious parallels between the nutrition messaging I shared above and straight-up diet rules, it’s helpful to understand a little about kids’ cognitive development and how they interpret these messages. Under the age of 12, children are concrete thinkers. They haven’t yet developed the ability to think abstractly and don’t until well into their teen years. Herein lies the problem with nutrition education; kids cannot comprehend an abstraction like ‘ill-health’, ‘thiamin’ (that’s a B vitamin), or ‘saturated fat’ in the same way that my toddler can’t fathom why I can’t fabricate a fire-truck out of thin air. Their thinking is associative, rather than literal: ‘There was a fire truck just there, therefore I want another one, mama’. This means that nutrition messages are interpreted in a black-and-white, all-or-nothing way; they are rule-based thinkers. That means that instead of being able to appreciate the nuance that white pasta is patently more delicious, but brown pasta helps us poop, they understand white pasta is ‘bad’, therefore ‘I am bad if I eat white pasta’ (or insert any food that diet culture has vilified).

‘So often, it’s what we don’t say,’ explains Kelly Fullerton, a primary school teacher and nutritionist based in Melbourne Australia who is working to empower teachers to teach kids about food in creative, developmentally appropriate and embodied ways, grounded in a context that’s meaningful for them. ‘And if you think about how hard children are working to construct the meaning of health information - this sends a very literal - black or white message.’