nutrition

Early childhood nutrition education is just diet culture in disguise

Early childhood nutrition education is just diet culture in disguise

American children are bombarded with messages from every angle telling them that there is an ideal way to eat and that being thin is both healthy and desirable. The education that children receive about nutrition from parents, schools and the media involves policing food choices, regulating exercise and monitoring weight, often via the inaccurate and misleading body mass index measurement. These practices place moral judgments on what children eat and what their bodies look like. While efforts from adults to teach the youth about nutrition are well-intentioned, they often end up laying the foundation for children to develop unhealthy relationships with food and their bodies.