Environmental influences on children's eating

Dramatic changes in lifestyles and the environment have brought about significant alterations in children's eating patterns and food choices. Understanding these changes is pivotal if we are to help today's children establish healthy eating patterns, which contribute to the prevention and delay of chronic disease later in life. This paper describes the most salient environmental factors affecting children's eating patterns and identifies those that appear most amenable to influence through public policy initiatives. A myriad of sociocultural and demographic factors that characterize the U.S. population today have combined to affect what children eat, where children eat, and with whom they eat. What was once mainly in the purview of family decision making is now increasingly in the realm of caregivers and peers, and many eating encounters occur away from home. Equally important is the plethora of societal and cultural factors that influence children's food intake in the home, schools, institutions, child care settings, health care programs, and the marketplace. American children are given more and more responsibility for making their own food decisions and are constantly exposed to advertising messages about food. Federally sponsored food assistance programs, such as Food Stamps, Child Nutrition Programs, Head Start, and the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC), make positive contributions to the kinds and amounts of food made available to many children. This paper makes a number of policy recommendations that have the potential to positively influence children's eating patterns and nutritional status. These include: Provide tools to families so that they can provide healthful food choices and facilitate the teaching of sound eating practices to children, by means of (a) promoting partnerships and coordination among government programs, the private sector, and schools to support the family structure, which is pivotal for teaching decision making and self-management of health and nutrition; (b) developing family-school partnerships for teenagers to combat negative peer influences and help parents and adolescents adopt positive health and eating behaviors; (c) reform the welfare system to reward work, bolster parents' academic and job skills, and ensure a decent standard of living that will enable families to provide adequate food and foster healthful eating patterns. Reduce fragmentation and lack of coordination among food assistance, public health, social service, and education programs that serve the same target populations. Form partnerships with the media to help children improve their eating habits by promoting food choices consistent with recommendations made in Dietary Guidelines for Americans. An ample supply of healthful foods must be made available to children from which they can choose, and the information base on which these food choices are made must be relevant and sound. By working together in partnerships between public and private sector enterprises, we can make the eating environment more healthful, thus enabling America's children to enjoy better health and well-being.