TheSoko.com - New Nutritional Guidelines for Alberta's Children

New nutritional guidelines for Alberta’s children might be another good step towards halting child obesity. Peter Liu hails its arrival.

Travel around the country enough and you can say with some certainty that childhood obesity is a frighteningly real aspect of our lives that needs to be quashed here and soon. Canada’s children have scored low marks in levels of exercise, fitness and proper eating. In Alberta alone, upwards of one in four children are either overweight or obese. To help counteract the issue, the government of Alberta has been actively crusading against foods and food preparation methods that are detrimental to our children’s health. Their latest attempt is a complement to the Canadian Food Guide to Healthy Eating and designed specifically to assist schools, daycare facilities and recreation centres with guidelines to serve and promote healthy food.

The Supreme Guide

Alberta’s Nutrition Guidelines for Children and Youth is a 106-page all-inclusive guideline and manual for healthy food recommendations and practices for any daycare, school or recreational facility. The first of its kind to specifically address children and caregivers, the guide was created as another tool to use against the child obesity epidemic. The fact that children are developing adult-onset diabetes is more than enough to remind people that child obesity is a serious issue, and these nutrition guidelines lay down the rules. With that in mind, the guide provides exact instructions on how, when and at which times to feed meals to children, in a clear and concise enough manner to be foolproof.

Guide Breakdown

With a simple mandate of promoting healthy food and food practices to children and youth, the nutrition guidelines cost $200,000 to create, offering support to encourage the “total diet approach” to eating healthy. The nutrition guide itself opens with a list of principles that led the development process, which included health promotion and a practical guide to assist caregivers with feeding children. There’s also a page or two full of subtle reminders of what bad food choices can lead to (cancer, diabetes) to remind you that healthy eating is a wise thing to do.

Food groups are split into three categories: choose most often, choose sometimes and choose least often. Foods are then split among those categories, with food choices borrowed from the exhaustive list of the Food Guide. There are exact serving size dimensions for an expansive amount of foods, from naan bread and legumes to sushi, venison and macaroni and cheese. Foods that fall into the 'choose sometimes' category consist mainly of foods that have been processed, with all the naughty, sugary, decadent foods rounding out the ‘choose least often’ category.

Sound Advice

Sections for daycare facilities, schools and recreational facilities list specific information on providing healthy food for children and youth. Each section also comes with separate recommendations on how to introduce and promote the proliferation of healthy items.

Daycare facility recommendations include things like being nut-aware, ensuring food is cut into easily edible pieces, slowly introducing more healthy items and not using food as reward or punishment.

School recommendations consist of stocking vending machines with healthy food, reducing unhealthy food portions when possible and the promotion of healthy eating at all times. There also contains a list that balances the levels of healthy food and unhealthy food with overall grade level. It suggests that elementary schools have 100 per cent healthy food, for example, with foods all chosen from the ‘choose most often’ category. High schools are at a 50/50 percentage balance, while junior high schools are to have 60 per cent of their foods from the ‘choose most often’ category and 40 per cent from the ‘choose sometimes’ category.

Recreational facility recommendations propose ensuring competitive pricing between healthy products and processed foods, providing more healthy food choices per food group and encouraging coaches and camp leaders to understand and implement basic nutrition guidelines.

The guide is further rounded out with tips and suggestions on how to limit unhealthy food around children, further healthy eating in children and youth and how to encourage role models that help kids around them eat healthy. Food label reading tips are also included showing how to compare between products and gauge the nutritional level between similar foods.

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good start

Slowly but surely, governments are coming to understand that child obesity is not to be taken lightly and that the solution to the problem begins with helping the younger generation. Clear-cut guidelines on how to steer unhealthy food away from schools, daycares and recreational centres offer additional support to child caregivers and moves child obesity another inch towards elimination.

Sources:
Healthy Alberta
Canada.com
Alberta.ca