When Healthy Eating Education does more Harm than Good

There has been a lot of discussion recently about the new school food standards in England.

I think there are plenty of good reasons to want children to have access to nutritious, varied and enjoyable food at school - but another part of the conversation that I think deserves more attention is:

What messages are we sending children about food alongside the food being provided?

There's a difference between making sure a school lunch includes vegetables and teaching a child that vegetables are “good”, chocolate is “bad” and eating the “wrong” food means they have made a poor choice. The first is about the food environment. The second is a dangerous lesson in food morality.

🧠 Nutrition education can be harmful

Most nutrition education is well-intentioned.

We want children to understand how food supports growth, development, concentration, learning and sport. We want them to have the skills to prepare food and make informed choices.

But children don't necessarily hear the message in the way it might have been intended.

“Try to eat a balanced diet” can become:

→ “I need to make the right choice every time.”

“Eat less sugary food” can become:

→ “Sugar is something I should avoid.”

“Choose healthy snacks” can become:

→ “Some snacks are healthy and some are unhealthy.”

And for some children, these messages can contribute to food rules, guilt, anxiety around eating, restriction and preoccupation with food and body image.

Recent research with adolescent girls found that some young people experienced school healthy-eating education in ways that reinforced rigid ideas about food, morality and restriction. Participants also highlighted the need for education around body image, social media and eating disorders alongside traditional nutrition education (Brighty and Langdon-Daly, 2026).

A wider systematic review has also identified potential unintended consequences of school-based health and nutrition policies, including concerns around disordered eating behaviours and possible eating disorder triggers (Turner et al., 2024).

So what might nutrition education look like if we considered both physical and psychological health?

🥦 Move away from “good” and “bad” foods

Children don't need to learn a list of foods they should eat and foods they should avoid.

Instead, we can talk about:

• what different foods provide

• why we need a variety of nutrients

• how our nutritional needs change as we grow

• how different foods can contribute to a meal

• why our needs can differ from someone else's

  
  

Instead of asking:

“Which of these is the healthiest lunch?”

We could ask:

“What could we add to this lunch to give us a wider variety of nutrients?”

➕ Think about what we can add

Nutrition education can very easily become a lesson in subtraction.

• Less sugar.

• Less fat.

• Less salt.

• Less processed food.

  
  

Instead, we can teach children about what they need more of.

🍞 Fibre

🥛 Calcium

🍗 Protein

🥦 Vitamins and minerals

🍚 Carbohydrates

🥑 Fats

💧 Fluids

This doesn't mean pretending that nutrition recommendations don't exist. It means giving children useful information without turning eating into an endless exercise in restriction.

📱 Teach children how to question nutrition information

Children will have access to nutrition information (and misinformation) from a wide range of sources as a result of social media. They're seeing it on TikTok, Instagram and YouTube. From Influencers, fitness accounts and wellness brands. And increasingly, from people confidently presenting personal opinions as nutritional facts.

So perhaps one of the most useful things we can teach children is where they can safely get their nutrition information from.

Questions like:

• Who is telling me this?

• Are they qualified to give this advice?

• Are they trying to sell me something?

• What evidence are they using?

• Is this a recommendation for everyone, or an individual person's experience?

• Does the information make food seem unnecessarily frightening or complicated?

  
  

🌍 Remember that food doesn't exist in a vacuum

We also need to be careful about presenting food choices as purely individual decisions.

Children's eating is influenced by:

• family circumstances

• food availability

• culture and religion

• finances

• allergies and medical needs

• sensory preferences

• neurodiversity

• anxiety and mental health

• the school environment

• what food is actually available to them

  
  

There are a number of factors that feed into the dietary choice a child might be making:

Maybe they can't afford anything else.

Maybe there isn't an option that works for their dietary needs.

Maybe the dining hall is overwhelming.

Maybe they don't have enough time to eat.

Maybe they're worried about being judged.

Maybe they're already struggling with food.

We need to understand the context before assuming the problem is a lack of nutritional knowledge.

⚖️ And we don't need to make weight the lesson

Children don't need to learn that their body size is something they should be monitoring or trying to change.

Nutrition education can cover growth, development and health without asking children to:

❌ Calculate their BMI

❌ Count calories

❌ Weigh or measure themselves

❌ Compare their bodies with other children

❌ Learn how to “earn” or compensate for food through exercise

There is also a wider issue here around the messages children receive about weight.

When children are repeatedly exposed to messages about obesity, weight loss and the need to change their bodies, we shouldn't be surprised when some begin to believe that their body size is a problem that needs fixing.

🍽️ Food education can be about actual food too

Not every lesson about food needs to involve nutrition.

Children can:

🌱 Grow food

👩‍🍳 Learn to cook

🥖 Learn about where food comes from

🌍 Explore food from different cultures

👃 Explore different tastes, smells and textures

🛒 Learn practical food skills

🍽️ Talk about the social and cultural role of food

Food education can be an opportunity to build skills, curiosity and confidence around food, rather than another opportunity to categorise it.

🤔 So where does this leave us?

I don't think the answer is to stop talking to children about nutrition.

The new school food standards are focused on what schools provide. But we also need to think about the messages children receive alongside that food.

• We can encourage children to eat nourishing food without teaching them that other foods are bad.

• We can talk about nutrition without creating rigid rules.

• We can promote health without making body size the measure of it.

• And we can give children nutritional knowledge without giving them another reason to worry about whether they're eating “correctly”.

References

Brighty, H. and Langdon-Daly, J. (2026) “The impact of school-based healthy eating education on adolescent girls’ diet and body image: A reflexive thematic analysis,” Journal of Health Psychology

Turner, S.L. et al. (2024) “The unintended consequences of school-based health and nutrition policies: a systematic review,” Frontiers in Psychology, 15. 

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