Children’s health and food: new name, same aim

Five years ago, we started our childhood obesity programme with a key belief: All children should have the opportunity to be healthy and eat well, no matter where they live. Five years later, that hasn’t changed – in fact, it feels more important than ever.  

In the first half of our ten-year programme, we have learned so much about how to effectively talk about this work to improve children’s health and diets. One of the most powerful things we’ve learned is that what we say about children’s health, and how we say it, matters just as much as what we do. To reflect this, we have decided to change the Childhood Obesity programme’s name.

Going forward the programme will be known as Children’s health and food.

How did we decide on the new name?

What we say first about children’s health and the food they eat can trigger helpful or unhelpful mindsets. Childhood obesity is a top-of-mind issue for the public, but people think about it in narrow, stigmatising, and fatalistic ways. So, in 2020 we developed an evidence-based toolkit with FrameWorks UK that helps us and others working in this to talk about the impact environments have on children’s health in a transformative way. As a result, we shifted how we talk about the issue to focus on children’s health, rather than childhood obesity. To enable us to open up a different kind of conversation, one that gets us more quickly to more effective solutions, it was time to also update our name.   

We set about finding a programme name that better reflects the work we’re doing to ensure healthy, affordable food is available for every child, no matter where they live. We worked closely with colleagues across the Foundation, as well as our partners, to choose a name that captures the work we’ve done to date and where we’re headed in future. We believe our new name reflects the strong link between children’s health, food and the places where children and young people live, shop and go to school. It also speaks to the huge inequity in access to nutritious, affordable food.