Nutrition

Quite apart from benefiting a child’s physical development, a healthy diet seems to aid learning, too.

Apart from benefiting child development, healthy eating seems to help reading and arithmetic, too.

Healthy eating may improve children’s reading and arithmetic skills, according to new research. But exactly which foods and dietary habits have been linked to academic achievement? European researchers are starting detailed work to find out. If a child’s diet is short on energy and nutrients, it’s been shown brain development and academic performance can suffer. However, identifying the foods and nutrients essential for healthy growth is difficult.

Much attention has focused on nutrients such as iron or fatty acids. Swedish researchers, whose results appeared in the Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, found children given fish oil supplements in a three-month trial had improved reading ability compared with another group of nine to 10-year-olds who took a placebo. What’s more, children with attention problems also benefited. Although the findings are intriguing and warrant more investigation, administering fish oil to an entire population isn’t possible. Instead, a focus on changing children’s overall eating habits to improve their nutrition – and potentially academic performance – is more realistic.

We know, for example, many children eat a lot of processed and convenience foods high in sugar and saturated fat at the expense of wholefoods, such as vegetables, that are rich in vitamins, minerals and fibre, or lean protein, such as fish. But the question remains: how does diet affect learning?

Elsewhere in Scandinavia, Finnish researchers studied the diet and academic performance of grade

1-3 (ages 7-10) schoolchildren.

What they ate was assessed, along with their health and reading and maths abilities. Their diet was then compared with an ideal index for a Mediterranean-style diet, a Baltic Sea Diet (BSD) and the Finnish Children Healthy Eating Index (FCHEI).

The Finnish team found eating a healthy diet, more closely resembling the BSD or FCHEI, in grade 1 was associated with better reading skills among children in grades 1-3. Similarly, in Spain, researchers reported last year they had found an association between eating a Mediterranean-style diet and better academic performance among nine to 15-year-olds.

Although parental academic achievement levels were accounted for in all these studies, it’s possible parents who enable their children to eat a healthy diet also promote their learning in other immeasurable ways. Still, quite apart from aiding academic

performance, there are many reasons to ensure children eat soundly, including for optimal physical development and general well-being.

In Finland, children are served a free school lunch every day that includes vegetables, low-fat milk and high-fibre grain products. Contrast that with New Zealand, where charities and social enterprises such as Kids Can and Eat My Lunch struggle to provide lunches to thousands of children who might otherwise go hungry.

Breaking the intergenerational cycle of poverty and hunger with accessible nutritious school lunches could make a real difference to children’s health and potentially their academic achievement. In the words of children’s author Dr Seuss, “The more that you read, the more things you will know. The more that you learn, the more places you’ll go.”

Finnish children receive a daily free school lunch of vegetables, low-fat milk and high-fibre grain products.