Nurturing Children's Healthy Eating: Position statement.

The relationship between eating a healthy diet and positive health outcomes is well known; nurturing healthy eating among children therefore has the potential to improve public health. A healthy diet occurs when one's usual eating patterns include adequate nutrient intake and sufficient, but not excessive, energy intake to meet the energy needs of the individual. However, many parents struggle to establish healthy eating patterns in their children due to the pressures of modern life. Moreover, healthcare providers often do not have the time or the guidance they need to empower parents to establish healthy eating practices in their children. Based on existing evidence from epidemiologic and intervention research, the Nurturing Children's Healthy Eating collaboration, established by Danone Institute International, has identified four key themes that encourage and support healthy eating practices among children in the modern Western world. The first - positive parental feeding - explores how parenting practices and styles, such as avoiding food restriction, allowing children to make their own food choices, and encouraging children to self-limit their portion sizes, can influence children's dietary intake. The second - eating together - highlights the link between eating socialization through regular family meals and healthful diet among children. The third - a healthy home food environment - explores the impact on eating practices of family resources, food availability/accessibility, parental modeling, and cues for eating. The fourth - the pleasure of eating - associates children's healthy eating with pleasure through repeated exposure to healthful foods, enjoyable social meals, and enhancement of the cognitive qualities (e.g. thoughts or ideas) of healthful foods. This paper reviews the evidence leading to the characterization of these nurturing themes, and ways in which recommendations might be implemented in the home.

French consumers' perceptions of nutrition and health claims: A psychosocial-anthropological approach.

UNLABELLED: French consumers' perceptions of nutrition and health claims (NHC) are studied using both qualitative (n = 89) and quantitative (n = 1000) methods. We analyse the participants' unprompted associations between nutrients and foods and construct a "lay food composition table". We find evidence for a degree of familiarity, in most cases in name only, with macronutrients and a small number of micronutrients. We then turn to assessing how compatible nutritional claims are with the « lay food composition table ¼ and with pre-existing, culture-based representations of the fate of foods in the body. We thus identify some principles predicting for positive or negative response in relation to types of claims. We also assess the credibility of types of claims according to the function cited and the carrier food. Finally, we test perception of hypothetical fortifications according to origin of nutrient and type of carrier food (e.g. omega 3 from fish oil in ham). RESULTS AND CONCLUSIONS: we find (1) that the very principle of fortification disrupts culture-based representations French consumers have of the link between food and health, which they consider to essentially reside in a "varied and balanced diet". And that (2), in spite of a general disposition against NHC, some types of claims are deemed more acceptable and credible than others. The questions raised by these findings are whether and to what extent nutrition can, does and should replace food cultures.