Grant: Operating Grant: CCHS - Nutrition Analysis

Ensuring that children have access to healthy food to grow, learn and thrive is a major challenge in Canada, since few children meet Canada's Food Guide's recommendations for healthy eating. Children report even poorer quality diets as they grow into teenagers, and face extra barriers to a healthy diet if their families struggle to keep food on the table. Schools have the potential to make a difference since students typically eat at least one or more meals at school. Since 2004, all 10 Canadian provinces have created policies about what types of foods schools should offer, but some advocates think schools should be doing more by improving access to healthy meals, milk programs and reducing access to 'junk' foods. Yet little is known about what Canadian children eat during school hours or how children's dietary quality at school has changed over the last decade as new policies and programs have been created. In 2015, Statistics Canada carried out a nation-wide survey of what Canadians eat, making it the first survey of national dietary habits since 2004 and only the second national nutrition survey since the 1970s. This study will take advantage of this valuable opportunity to combine information from these two nutrition surveys to answer important questions about what children eat during school hours, how diets have changed over time and whether different cities and provinces have fared better when it comes to what children eat at school. We will also study what children drink at school and whether drinking milk during school-hours helps children meet their needs for important nutrients like vitamin D and calcium, and what role eating at fast food restaurants plays in the diets of Canadian students. This study is important for informing national policy debates about how best to improve the diets of Canadian children and for understanding how schools could improve children's health.