Start Early: Promoting healthy eating in child care settings

A new position paper released by the American Dietetic Association makes the case for establishing benchmarks for nutrition in child care settings, including the following guidelines:

• Foods and beverages served in child care should be nutritionally adequate and consistent with the Dietary Guidelines for Americans.



• Child care providers should model and encourage healthful eating for chilren.



• Child care providers should work with children to understand feelings of hunger and satiety and should respect children's hunger and satiety cues, once expressed.



• Child care providers should receive appropriate training in child nutrition, and nutrition education for children and families should be a component of the child care program.
  


• Child care providers should work with families to ensure that foods and beverages brought from home meet nutrition guidelines.

ADA also outlines a role for policy change to promote healthful eating and active play.

You can read a related article here:

Study: Obesity prevention should focus on day care

Experts say the fight against childhood obesity should have a new focus: day care.
Studies show that about 82% of American children under age 6 are in child care outside the home while their parents work.

That means many meals are no longer eaten around the family table, but at day care, where parents may have little control over what toddlers are eating.

Kids in full-time day care can get two-thirds of their daily calories there, “so it’s really other adults who are driving the nutritional value of what children consume,” says study researcher Sara Benjamin Neelon, PhD. She's an assistant professor in the department of community and family medicine at Duke University Medical Center in Durham, N.C.

In a new study, published in the Journal of the American Dietetic Association, Benjamin Neelon and her colleagues reviewed 42 studies of obesity prevention related practices in day care.

They found that most states have minimal requirements for healthy eating and physical activity in child care that may differ from public health expert recommendations. Experts who were not involved in the research praised its scope and said that while it points to substantial problems, it also suggests that day care can be an important place to make lasting changes in a child’s life.

Starting Young

“In general, there’s been an increasing awareness that we have to start tackling obesity very early in a child’s life,” says Alice Ammerman, DrPH, a nutrition professor and director of the Center for Health Promotion and Disease Prevention at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

“I think things are moving in the right direction, but I think there’s a lot of potential for greater improvement,” particularly through day care, Ammerman says.