EASTER IS ALMOST upon us. The supermarket shelves are bulging with Easter eggs and each child in Ireland will receive an average of six eggs, while HSE clinical lead on obesity, Professor Donal O’Shea, advised last year that they should receive one. Six or more eggs per child have been normalised at Easter – demonstrating just how skewed our toxic food environment has become.

The Minister for Social Protection, Dara Calleary, wants to challenge that unhealthy food environment for primary school children. On Friday, he announced that the Hot School Meals Programme was to be expanded to an additional 713 primary schools.

In response to a rising tsunami of criticism, he also announced a review of the nutritional standards for the scheme by a dietician who will be supervised by the Department of Health and for a report to be submitted to him by the end of the year. He stated that foods high in saturated fat, salt and sugar should be removed from the programme by next September.

Mr Calleary said that suppliers will be required to adhere to robust guidelines on the nutritional value of meals and the dietary requirements of students, as well work to reduce food waste and utilise recyclable packaging.

Good news, right?

It is a positive move. But the real change here is the removal of foods high in fat, salt and sugar from being provided once a week, which is accommodated in the nutritional standards. What is not being addressed is the quantity of ultra-processed foods (UPF) that are contained in these lunches.

Ultra-processed foods (UPFs)

Food policy consultant and lecturer in food policy at UCC, Ruth Hegarty, commented in January that food additives, especially in their combination and through regular consumption, are disease-promoting and contribute to creating a UPF-based diet for children.’

‘One of the meals I looked at,’ Ruth Hegarty said, ‘was chicken curry and rice. You would think that’s pretty straightforward, but there were around 75 ingredients in that particular meal. These include processing aids and additives like sodium citrate, dextrose, xylitol, maltodextrin and modified starch.’

Prof O’Shea agrees. Speaking on RTE’s Upfront with Katie Hannon, he suggested that ‘we should not be providing ultra-processed anything under this scheme.’

So how can we do better? Here are a few suggestions…

Maximising the benefit of offering hot meals to children in schools is about more than meeting nutrition standards in a mid-day meal.

We need to be much more ambitious about what we can achieve. That means aiming to transform the food culture for children, both inside and outside the school building. It’s also about improving what’s offered at school parties and family events, how we reward kids…

It’s about ensuring that what we as adults eat matches what we teach kids about healthy eating, both at home and at school.

School food culture

Children spend about 1,200 hours in school every year, and many of them rely on school meals for vital nutrition. Creating a healthy school food culture is a critical step towards reversing the national health crisis of obesity facing our children.

The secrets to a healthy school culture involve making healthy options standard whenever foods are sold or shared – parties, fundraisers, school events or celebrations. Make fresh fruits and vegetables, water, dairy products and whole foods front and centre for students. Limit or eliminate unhealthy choices that send conflicting messages about what we value and make it harder for kids to internalise healthy habits. Provide non-food rewards for good performance. Use food as an opportunity for nutrition education with school gardens, taste tests and healthy snack time.

Vegpower

One group that has been really successful in transforming children’s attitudes to vegetables is the UK organisation Vegpower. The organisation ran an ‘Eat Them to Defeat Them’ campaign from 2020 to 2024 to challenge the premise among kids that vegetables were ‘boring.’

Children were on a mission to eat their vegetables while defeating them, trying out lots of vegetables they would never have eaten before. Every week, the campaign focused on a new family favourite vegetable that was part of a tasting table as well as on the menu.

Kids were rewarded with stickers for tasting. I saw this campaign in action in primary schools in a low-income area in Belfast and how well it went down with the kids. They were excited about vegetables.

Schools held veg assemblies, displayed veggie posters and decorations and used veggie lesson plans which were produced for the school by Vegpower as part of the campaign. This is the type of innovative programme that appeals to kids and changes the culture around healthy food.

Role models

Cristiano Ronaldo made headlines at a Euro 2020 press conference when he removed two bottles of Coca-Cola out of sight of the camera, encouraging people to drink water instead.

He followed it by holding up a bottle of water, saying in Portuguese: ‘Agua!’ Coca-Cola’s share price dropped by 1.6% almost immediately, and the market value of Coca-Cola dropped by $4bn.

In 2021, Paul O’Connell, along with fellow rugby internationals James Ryan, Beibhinn Parsons and Linda Djoulong, fronted a campaign to encourage kids who are into their sport to eat fruit and vegetables. As Ross O’Carroll-Kelly tweeted: ‘If Paul O’Connell told me to eat fruit and vegetables, I would eat fruit and vegetables. I wouldn’t peel them first.’

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We need more of this. What a difference it would make to young kids in Ireland to see the likes of rugby internationals Jack Crowley or Bundee Aki turning their backs on soft drink sponsors of the IRFU, in favour of water, or vegetables and fruit over chips and pizza?

It was reported recently that discussions were ongoing over a multi-million pound deal that could see Coca-Cola re-emerge as the UK Premier League’s official soft drinks partner. The soft drinks company knows just how important this mega deal is in terms of influencing young kids to keep drinking their high sugar brands.

Influencers have a huge impact on young kids’ behaviour. If we saw more of them advocating for fruit, vegetables and whole foods, the short-term impact on their bank balances would be outweighed by the huge impact it could have on young kids’ attitudes to healthy food and drinks right across the country.

Family school partnerships

Childhood healthy habits and lifestyles are driven by adults. School staff and families collaborating together on school health programmes can transform the culture around healthy habits, including food, physical activity, phones, sleep and much more.

Strong family-school partnerships are the bedrock of innovative movements that ensure everyone is on the same page around what constitutes a healthy foundation for children that will sustain them into their adult lives.

The research is very clear. Kids perform better in school when they eat healthier foods.

Minister Calleary’s announcement to expand Hot School Meals and Review Nutritional Standards is a welcome step to improve the accessibility and nutritional content of school meals.

The first step is to remove not just foods high in fat, salt and sugar from the menu but to remove all ultra-processed foods from the Hot School Meals programme.

With enough ambition, there is an opportunity here to transform the toxic food culture that surrounds children in every environment in which they travel in their daily lives.

It remains to be seen whether the opportunity will be matched by sufficient political commitment and resources to turn that possibility into a reality.

Dr Catherine Conlon is a public health doctor and former director of human health and nutrition, safefood.