Children’s diets are attracting lots of attention at the moment. To support your work, we have two important updates on Healthy Early Years Diets to share with you this week:

OHA position paper

The Obesity Health Alliance (OHA), of which iHV is a member, has published its new joint position paper: Healthy Early Years Diets: Achieving the Best Start in Life

In this document, OHA outlines the steps that the government should take to enable children to grow up healthily.  The recommendations cover three areas

  1. Enabling families to feed their babies & young children healthy diets
  2. Supporting early years settings to provide nutritious food & drink
  3. Investing in the foundations for health in the early years.

This document is published ahead of OHA’s meeting with Public Health Minister, Dame Andrea Leadsom MP, later this month.

The Food Foundation’s animation

The Food Foundation’s excellent new animation Nourishing the Nation: A shared vision of a brighter future calls on policy makers to take decisive action to reshape the food system in election year.  Social media assets and social media pack with suggested posts and more information is available here.

The Food Foundation wants as many people as possible to have their say and join the conversation about what can be done to build a food system where healthy and sustainable food is accessible to all.

If you could help to make a noise on social media by doing the following things:

  • Like and share the animation on your social channels
  • When you post the video, share one thing you’d like to see change about the food system e.g. Free school meals for all/ a high street where fresh, locally sourced veg is the cheaper option/ a community garden in every new housing development/ adverts for carrots on TV!
  • Tag The Food Foundation and your local MP or a minister of a relevant department to make sure they see the video and use the hashtags #NourishingTheNation and #MyFoodVision

A joint statement assessing the health benefits and risks of the introduction of peanut and hen’s egg into the infant diet before six months of age in the UK.

The Scientific Advisory Committee on Nutrition (SACN) and the Committee on Toxicity of Chemicals in Food, Consumer Products and the Environment (COT) have published a joint statement outlining the assessment undertaken by the joint SACN-COT working group on the timing of introduction of peanut and hen’s egg into the infant diet before 6 months of age in the UK. This paper summarises the findings of the working group and provides consensus advice to government.

Conclusions

The benefit-risk assessment indicated that there were insufficient data to support the existence of a “window of opportunity” for the introduction of peanut before six months of age. Evidence that the introduction of hen’s egg before six months might be beneficial was limited and derived from RCTs where participants were not representative of the general population.

The benefit-risk assessment indicated that there were insufficient data to demonstrate that the introduction of peanut or hen’s egg into the infant diet between four and six months of age reduced the risk of developing food allergy to any greater extent than introduction from around six months.

Reasonable data exist to demonstrate that the deliberate exclusion or delayed introduction of peanut or hen’s egg beyond six to twelve months of age may increase the risk of allergy to the same foods.

Recommendations for government

The government should continue to recommend exclusive breastfeeding for around the first six months of life. Advice on complementary feeding should state that foods containing peanut and hen’s egg need not be differentiated from other complementary foods. Complementary foods should be introduced in an age-appropriate form from around six months of age, alongside continued breastfeeding, at a time and in a manner to suit both the family and individual child.

The deliberate exclusion of peanut or hen’s egg beyond six to twelve months of age may increase the risk of allergy to the same foods. Once introduced, and where tolerated, these foods should be part of the infant’s usual diet, to suit both the individual child and family. If initial exposure is not continued as part of the infant’s usual diet, then this may increase the risk of sensitisation and subsequent food allergy.

Families of infants with a history of early-onset eczema or suspected food allergy may wish to seek medical advice before introducing these foods.