Your child’s nutritional wellness is very important, but how do you know if their day-care facility believes the same thing? While you might assume institutions would follow recommended guidelines, you can’t be there every minute of every day to check the daycare is taking care of your child’s wellbeing (if you were able, you wouldn’t need daycare in the first place!) Luckily, a new study, published in the peer-reviewed Journal of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, has actually looked at whether recommendations on childhood feeding practices were being followed by US daycare institutions.
The study was carried out by researchers from the University of Illinois and was funded by the US Department of Health and Human Services, the Illinois Trans-Disciplinary Obesity Prevention Program, the Illinois Council for Food and Agricultural Research, the University of Illinois and the US Department of Agriculture. The researchers undertook a cross-sectional survey of how 118 childcare facilities in the US fed children in their care. A mix of different organisations ran these facilities, including Head Start (a US government programme for children and their families on a low income), the Child and Adult Care Food Program (CACFP), a US federal initiative which provides subsidised food services for children in daycare and other non-government daycare programmes (called non-CACFP).
The recommendations for healthy feeding practices were developed by the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics in 2011, and the researchers looked at whether childcare providers in these programmes met these recommendations. More than 12 million preschool children attend childcare in the US, and up to three-quarters of their daily energy intake is consumed while there. This makes your child’s daycare facility the perfect place to promote healthy eating behaviours and prevent obesity – if they meet the right guidelines.
As part of the guidance, childcare providers should:
- sit with the children during meals
- eat meals together with the children
- serve meals “family-style” (rather than delivered pre-plated or in bulk)
- help children recognise internal hunger and fullness signals with verbal cues
- not use controlling practices such as restrictions on food or pressure to eat
- provide a model of healthy eating
- teach children about nutrition
- encourage balance and variety of foods
- train staff in nutrition
- educate children and parents about nutrition
The results of the study revealed that Head Start providers sat more frequently with children during meals, ate the same foods as children and served meals family-style more often, compared with CACFP and non-CACFP providers. Head Start also won out in terms of providing parents and children with more nutrition-education opportunities, encouraging more balance and variety of foods and offering healthier foods. This means that Head Start providers had greater compliance with the Academy’s benchmarks compared with CACFP and non-CACFP providers.
But does the research stack up? According to the NHS website, ‘Overall, the research found that most childcare programmes were following the recommendations. But it should be noted that the researchers used questionnaires that the childcare organisations filled in themselves (which could be open to bias). The study also did not look at any outcomes for the children. The question of whether regular mealtimes do produce “slimmer children” remains unanswered – at least by this research. A 2011 review of studies involving around 100,000 children suggested an association between regular family mealtimes and a reduction in the risk of a child being overweight. Credible as this evidence seems, it is likely that more research is needed before the style and culture of mealtimes can be conclusively linked with children’s weight.’
