The Obesity Health Alliance has a new joint position statement (together with First Steps Nutrition Trust), ‘Healthy Early Years Diets: Achieving the Best Start in Life’ which outlines the next steps the government can take, to create healthier food environments and help ensure the UK’s youngest children and babies grow up healthily. This will be key to delivering not only key government health priorities, but also levelling up and ensuring every child can reach their full potential, regardless of where they were born.
We propose a series of achievable, evidence-informed and cost-effective steps that will measurably improve the quality of diets in the early years looking at:
Enabling families to feed their babies and young children healthy diets
Supporting early years settings to provide nutritious food and drink
Investing in the foundations for health in the early years
With evidence showing good diets in the early years create the foundation for life-time good health, our key recommendations include:
- Protect babies and young children from misleading marketing
- Implement standards to improve commercial baby and toddler food and drinks
- Ensure early years settings are supported with healthy food and eating guidance – and legislate it so all can benefit
- Invest in local community health staff and programmes to support healthy eating in the early years
- Invest in the Healthy Start scheme
Please click on the image for the full position statement:
We thank the Obesity Health Alliance membership and all contributing organisations, for their help in coming together and agreeing a set of priorities for this vital area, to ensure our babies and young children grow up healthily.
For more information, please contact kat.jenner@obesityhealthalliance.org.uk