Food Systems for Children and Adolescents

Elsevier, January 2021

This is a special issue on food systems for children and adolescents with research on food marketing, nutrition and sustaining healthy diets and food supply chains. It brings together research advancing SDGs 2, zero hunger, SDG 3, good health and wellbeing and SDG 12, responsible production and consumption. 

Elsevier,

Global Food Security, Volume 27, December 2020

Building on the Innocenti Framework on Food Systems for Children and Adolescents, this paper describes the significance of a food systems approach to improving children's diets. It summarizes the key learnings on effective intervention design from the papers in this special issue, focusing on the determinants in the framework: food supply chains, food environments, and behaviors of caregivers, children and adolescents. It lays out relevant policy and programmatic implications and organizes these according to the Nuffield ladder of public policy interventions.

Elsevier, Global Food Security, Volume 27, December 2020
This paper provides an overview of nutrition recommendations for dietary intakes necessary to support normal growth and development of children from birth to 18 years and to promote long-term health and quality of life. Key nutrients and food-based dietary recommendations have been examined from international evidence-based child dietary and feeding guidelines from the World Health Organization and a convenience sample of countries. The paper also reviews key issues relating to the environmental impacts of child diets.
Elsevier, Global Food Security, Volume 27, December 2020
Unhealthy food marketing has long been identified as a systems factor with negative health effects on children. The data-driven, personal data extraction and behavioural design practices of 21st century media advertising in digital technology systems mean that food marketing now sits at the intersection of multiple harms, infringing not only children's rights to health and to food, but also their rights to privacy and to be free from exploitation. This further sharpens the need for State regulation to protect children and their rights effectively.
Elsevier, Global Food Security, Volume 27, December 2020
Intervening in the food environment is critical to improve the diets and nutrition of children and adolescents. Little is known about the most effective interventions targeting children and adolescents, particularly in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). We conducted a scoping review of the literature to examine influence of external and personal food environment interventions on the diets and nutrition of children and adolescents. Most of the included studies examined interventions in school settings in the United States, with few studies from LMICs.
Elsevier, Global Food Security, Volume 27, December 2020
This paper focuses on the most proximate determinants of dietary intake: food behaviors of caregivers, children and adolescents. Utilizing a case study approach, we explored cultural-ecological factors that have been shown to affect behavioral interventions aimed improving diet quality. The results provide insights about facilitators and barriers to uptake of interventions aimed at improving dietary behaviors in children and adolescents and highlight their implications for planning and monitoring future interventions.
Elsevier,

Global Food Security,
Volume 27,
2020,
100443,
ISSN 2211-9124,

This paper describes the relationship between agriculture, food supply chains and children’s and adolescents’ diets and their food accessibility, advancing knowledge on SDG 2, zero hunger.
Elsevier, Global Food Security, Volume 27, December 2020
Current food systems are failing to guide children towards healthy diets. This paper presents a tool to identify the actions needed to reorient food systems to become more child-centred from a nutrition perspective. To connect the dots between children's lives, their food environments and food supply systems, the tool takes a child-centred, food systems approach.
Elsevier,

Global Food Security, Volume 27, December 2020

Transforming food systems is essential to ensuring nutritious, safe, affordable, and sustainable diets for all, including children and adolescents. This paper proposes a new conceptual framework (the ‘Innocenti Framework’) to better articulate how the diets of children and adolescents are shaped by food systems.

Elsevier,

Global Food Security,
Volume 27,
2020,
100442,
ISSN 2211-9124,
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gfs.2020.100442.

This paper provides an overview of children and adolescents’ diet. Food systems need to be redesigned to improve diet quality in children 0-19 years in order to address the multiple burdens of malnutrition. Data systems also need to be strengthened to track data quality among children. This article advances knowledge on SDG 2 and 3.
Elsevier, Global Food Security, Volume 27, December 2020
In this paper, we conducted a narrative review to describe age-specific characteristics that inform how children and adolescents interact with their food systems and how that relationship influences their diets. Children of all ages are active agents in determining the foods they eat. Numerous intrapersonal, interpersonal, and environmental characteristics influence their diets, and these shift over time.