“Did you know the Stegosaurus had 17 bony plates along its spine, to help manage body temperature and for protection?” He spoke with the animated energy only a five-year-old can bring to the subject of ancient reptiles. This moment sparked a delightful chapter in our home – our “dinosaur era”.
A few months later, the topic shifted to space. Did you know you can remember the order of planets by saying “My Very Educated Mother Just Served Me Noodles,” he recited proudly. Then came the plant cycle.
I was proud of his curiosity and his love of learning. He was clearly absorbing the marvels of science, and school seemed to ignite a spark in him. But as the year progressed, I noticed something; he never once mentioned the human body. No organs. No bones. No systems. So one evening, I asked him: “Do you know where your liver is? Or your kidneys? Do you know what they do?” He looked at me with curiosity, wanting to learn – but unaware.
We moved to Singapore in 2022, and in the time since, I’ve noticed encouraging steps to make nutrition a bigger part of school life. But there’s still so much more we can do – especially in the early years – to connect kids with the science that matters most to their daily lives.
This feels even more urgent now, with processed foods and sugar-laden snacks and drinks so easily within reach and kids being inundated with ads and content promoting them online.
A public health imperative
The World Health Organisation estimates that 35 million children under the age of five were overweight in 2024, with almost half that number in Asia.
In Singapore, student obesity rates rose from 11 per cent in 2013 to 16 per cent in 2021. Chronic diseases such as type 2 diabetes – once seen only in adults – are increasingly diagnosed in children.
Initiatives like the Healthy Meals in Schools Programme (HMSP), which was launched in 2011, are commendable and a meaningful step in the right direction. They try to establish healthier cooking methods and promote balanced meals. In 2016, Singapore launched its “war on diabetes”, a nationwide initiative to promote healthy eating habits. In 2023, a new standard was launched to equip and support care centres and school canteens in preparing nutritious meals.
But food choices alone are not enough. Without understanding why these choices matter, the learning is superficial. Imagine teaching plant biology without explaining photosynthesis.
Nutrition is not just a health topic. It is biology, chemistry, economics, environmental science and psychology all rolled into one. And it needs to start earlier in the classrooms.
To be clear, I’m not advocating a deep dive into methylation cycles, cytokines, immunoglobulins or the intricacies of autophagy in the classroom. But teaching nutrition is not merely lecturing children to eat their vegetables. Rather, it’s about empowerment and fostering understanding. It’s also about giving children – at every age of their development – a layered understanding of all the systems that sustain their lives and the tools to practice informed decision-making even at that early stage.
And we don’t have to reinvent the wheel.
Integrating nutrition into education
In 2005, Japan formalised shokuiku (food and nutrition education) as a basic law. This involved school lunches being woven into the formal curriculum with opportunities for such education and building food literacy.
All students receive school lunches that are cooked onsite with fresh, whole food ingredients. Seasonal ingredients are sourced from local farms and many schools have their own farms, allowing students to experience the entire cycle from seed to plate.
Nutrition education is taught by licensed nutrition educators to integrate food literacy into daily learning. These practices are linked – Japan has one of the most successful public food education systems and one of the lowest adult obesity rates worldwide.
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In Finland, the Basic Education Act (1998) mandates that every student receives a free school meal, and nutrition is woven into home economics, biology and health education. School meals follow strict nutritional standards and every school makes an action plan for food education individually taking health, nutrition and behavioural education into account.
In Singapore, there are efforts such as a recent initiative by NTUC First Campus’ My First Skool called Start Strong, Stay Strong for preschoolers. Students are introduced to different food groups and taught how to read nutrition labels and make better food choices. At the primary level, pupils use physical education journals to keep track of their food consumption.
While these efforts are promising, we can go further to embrace nutrition as a distinct pillar of health that deserves intentional integration into the fabric of daily school life. Let’s use nutrition education as a vehicle for learning, community connection and a lever in the public health strategy to tackle rising chronic disease rates.
A 2020 study by researchers found that school-based interventions can promote healthy eating, improve dietary behaviour and attitudes among young children, especially when they are multi-component and involve the wider community.
The study suggests that schools – as trusted places of learning – can play a far bigger role in improving dietary practices and behaviour than previously thought.
Nutrition can be meaningfully interwoven into various subjects. Food labels can be used to teach percentages and proportions in maths, persuasive essays or food journals in languages. Classrooms can become “living labs” where activities become developmental tools to shape eating habits.
Why it matters
Parents play an undeniable role in how we contribute to children’s eating behaviours. We serve as models and directly influence our children’s preferences by making certain foods available and through our own eating behaviour.
But too often, parents fall into the convenience trap of inexpensive, palatable, energy-dense foods that can promote overeating and inflammation.
Ask any first-time parent how much attention goes into a baby’s first food. But very quickly, after just a few months of solids, we seem to forget.
We forget the diversity of the gut microbiota – the ecosystem of microbes in our intestines – only stabilises around the age of three. But even after three years, it still remains highly responsive to daily inputs: what we eat, what we drink, the medications we take and the stress we experience.
We forget that our gut is not merely a digestive organ but also acts like a gate keeper to our brain, so much so that it is commonly known as “the second brain”.
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This dynamic ecosystem is being shaped every single day by the food our children consume – often without any awareness of its significance or risks.
Evidence indicates early dietary patterns can track into adulthood and influence risks for obesity, diabetes, heart disease, cancer and even mental health conditions. These are not abstract risks but risks that are unfolding in paediatric clinics and even in my own practice.
Our children’s meals aren’t just about today’s lunch – they’re shaping tomorrow’s health outcomes. By teaching nutrition early, consistently and joyfully, we give our children something far more valuable than a temporary grade: we give them life-long agency over their health.
Today, with chronic diseases appearing in childhood and adolescence – conditions once common among adults – we cannot afford to ignore this. School meals serve an important learning opportunity that we don’t want to miss.
The most important science our children can learn is happening inside their bodies. Let’s start teaching it early.
Jieun Wrigley is a functional nutritionist and founder of nutrition consultancy Rapid Nutrition Therapy.
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