Global food insecurity has been a growing risk, compounded by climate change, conflict and economic instability. At the same time, obesity rates have surged due to food production practices, the marketing of unhealthy dietary patterns, and sedentary lifestyles. Part of a series exploring education’s interrelationships with other Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), a new report released today by the GEM Report and the Research Consortium for School Health and Nutrition, an initiative of the School Meals Coalition, explores the critical intersection of education and nutrition. It advocates for a systemic, life-cycle approach to both sectors, aiming to enhance the global food landscape.
We can learn to eat well – for our health and for the planet.
Investment in education is a core strategy to achieve SDG 2, in other words, zero hunger. Education develops skills and informs choices for improved nutritional outcomes. Transforming food systems – addressing industry challenges and fostering sustainable farming – demands advanced skills gained through higher education, effective farmer training and the expertise of skilled professionals.
At the same time, when we eat well, we learn well.
Food security and improved nutrition amplifies educational achievement. Adequate early childhood nutrition is fundamental for growth, educational attainment and overall well-being. Nutritious school meals and education that offers experiential learning opportunities help orient individuals to pursue dietary choices that benefit both personal health and planetary sustainability. But as of 2022, only 93 out of 187 countries had legislation, compulsory standards or guidance on school food and beverages. Globally, 27% of school meal programmes do not employ nutritionists to advise on their design and implementation.
Beyond school, sustained public awareness campaigns throughout adulthood, coupled with the guidance of informed nutrition and health professionals, are crucial for fostering a comprehensive shift towards healthier nutritional practices.
Given the clear interdependencies between education and nutrition outcome indicators, the report makes the point that they need to be monitored more systematically. One example is the need to monitor not only of the coverage but also the quality of school meal programmes.
The report has five key recommendations for strengthening the nexus between education and nutrition, which will be presented at a side event to the Nutrition for Growth Summit taking place in Paris this week:
- Transform nutrition education into a lifelong learning pursuit. From early childhood to adult education, nutrition content should be embedded across the curriculum and into communication campaigns. Formal, non-formal and informal education matter but the channels through which they influence individuals and food systems should be explored further to improve teaching and learning.
- Systematically embed food literacy education, covering nutrition knowledge, practical skills and critical understanding of food in education efforts, in school and beyond.
- Programmes should balance theoretical knowledge with experiential learning, for example through gardening and cooking, to foster healthier, sustainable food habits.
- Integrate nutrition education into mass media and digital platform communications. Design evidence-based campaigns to improve nutrition knowledge and food safety awareness, while ensuring cultural relevance and avoiding messages that are moralizing and stigmatizing.
- Place schools at the centre of efforts to influence sustainable nutrition behaviours and outcomes. Apply a whole-school approach that combines school meal provision, nutrition education, physical activity and extracurricular initiatives, to achieve complementary education and nutrition objectives.
- Implement universal and nutritious, locally sourced school meal programmes to ensure equity and maximize learning outcomes – and finance them adequately and sustainably to progressively expand them from primary to secondary schools.
- Integrate nutrition education, developed with adequate nutrition expertise, into school feeding programmes to foster lifelong healthy and environmentally sustainable habits.
- Adopt holistic, systemic approaches to improve food environments, starting at schools. Use creative ways to address the obesogenic and unsustainable food environment by combining education with structural interventions, such as regulating marketing.
- Adopt a multisectoral approach to deliver effective nutrition interventions. Just as our relationship with food is multilayered, depending on a range of personal, interpersonal and systemic factors, different sectors, including education, need to collaborate to address nutrition challenges.
- Nutrition, health and agricultural policies should embed education components.
- Accordingly, partnerships across sectors should also focus on the role of education and communication activities to meet nutrition objectives.
- Build professional capacity through education and training to deliver on nutrition objectives. Bridging gaps in knowledge and skills at all levels is key to achieving equitable and sustainable nutrition outcomes worldwide.
- Integrate comprehensive nutrition curricula into medical, nursing and community health worker training to address gaps in nutrition knowledge and practice.
- Invest in nutrition expertise for school feeding programmes and ensure that these programmes include trained nutritionists for planning and monitoring.
- Reform agricultural education to integrate climate-smart practices, including indigenous knowledge systems, and nutrition objectives. Offer hands-on training through agricultural extension programmes, farmer field schools and peer-learning initiatives.
- Develop interdisciplinary education frameworks that emphasize nutrition, environmental sustainability and food justice in higher education institutions to develop food system leadership skills to address food system inequities and systemic transformation.
- Monitor the relationship between education and nutrition through the life cycle. Strengthen tracking of school meal and related health and nutrition programmes to improve the effectiveness of interventions.
- Improve research on education–nutrition links beyond the first 1,000 days by collecting data nutrition indicators for school-age children linked to learning outcome data.
- Refine the SDG 4 thematic indicator on school meal coverage in terms of alignment with policy targets, comparable quality definitions and the way country surveys are administered.
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