Food and Me. How Adolescents Experience Nutrition Across the World. A Companion Report to The State of the World's Children 2019

Abstract

Adolescence is defined by the World Health Organisation (WHO) as the period between ages 10 and 19. It can be seen as one of the ‘healthiest’ times of life, sitting between early life mortality and chronic disease in adulthood. However, this is also a time of great physical, emotional and social change, with rapid biological growth requiring additional nutrition. As the State of the World’s Children 2019: Children, Food and Nutrition reported, malnutrition, in the forms of stunting, wasting and overweight, means that globally one in three children is not growing well. Less visible, but just as worrying, is the extent of the ‘hidden hunger’ of deficiencies in vitamins and other essential nutrients. Adolescents are especially vulnerable to all these forms of malnutrition, in part due to their rapid growth and increased nutritional needs at this stage of life, along with a failure to consume a healthy diet. This then limits an adolescent’s physical and intellectual potential and perpetuates inequality across the generations, adding to the global burdens of communicable and non-communicable diseases. How can the world meet this malnutrition challenge? There has been a growing consensus in the nutrition community in recent years around the need to focus on food systems – or the sum of activities and actors involved in producing, processing, distributing, preparing and consuming foods. When it comes to improving adolescent nutrition, the ways in which adolescents interact with these complex food systems is vital. It was this thinking that lay behind the planning and implementation of an unprecedented series of workshops conducted around the world in 2019 as part of the research for UNICEF’s flagship report, The State of the World’s Children 2019: Children, food and Nutrition. With the generous support of UNICEF Country Offices and National Committees, over 600 adolescents from 18 countries participated in workshops designed to gather information about food and nutrition practices in diverse and engaging ways. This report is a companion to Children, food and nutrition, providing more depth to the information adolescents contributed in workshops. Adolescent voices from the workshops demonstrate how, sadly, food systems are failing young people. Although adolescents had some awareness of what constituted a ‘good diet’, several factors overrode this, shaping their food choices and compromising their dietary intake. Individual factors such as taste were key drivers of food choices, with many adolescents preferring ‘tasty’, ultra-processed foods. Food systems played a large role, with cost and availability of food options impacting what adolescents ate. Where unhealthy foods were cheaper and readily available these were often chosen over healthier options that could be more expensive, harder to find or more difficult to prepare. Along with these issues raised, adolescents provided concrete suggestions for changes in nutrition policies and practices, from food systems to investments in nutrition, leading to sustainable improvements in adolescents' health and well-being across the globe. By positioning adolescents as active partners in future work, we can break intergenerational cycles of poor nutrition and achieve sustainable change in adolescents' health and well-being across the globe.