Healthy food in schools can help children develop healthy dietary habits for life, according to the World Health Organization (WHO), which released a new global guideline on evidence-based policies and interventions to create healthy school food environments. For the first time, WHO is advising countries to adopt a whole-school approach that ensures food and beverages provided in schools and available throughout the broader school food environments are healthy and nutritious.
Childhood overweight and obesity are rising globally, while undernutrition remains a persistent challenge. Schools are on the front line of this double burden of malnutrition. In 2025, about 1 in 10 school-aged children and adolescents – 188 million – were living with obesity worldwide, surpassing for the first time the number of children who are underweight.
“The food children eat at school, and the environments that shape what they eat, can have a profound impact on their learning, and lifelong consequences for their health and well-being,” said Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, WHO nutrition right at school is critical for preventing disease later in life and creating healthier adults.”
Healthy dietary practices begin early in life. Children spend a significant portion of their day in school, making it a critical setting for shaping lifelong dietary habits and reducing health and nutrition inequities.
Today, an estimated 466 million children receive school meals globally, yet there remains limited information available about the nutritional quality of the food they are served.
In the guideline, WHO recommends that schools improve food provision at schools to promote greater consumption of foods and beverages that support a healthy diet. Specifically:
- Setting standards or rules to increase the availability, purchase and consumption of healthy foods and beverages, while limiting unhealthy foods (strong recommendation);
- Implementing nudging interventions to encourage children select, purchase and consume healthier foods and beverages (conditional recommendation). Nudging interventions can include a change to the placement, presentation or price of food options available to children.
Policies alone are not enough, and monitoring and enforcement mechanisms are essential to ensure that guidelines are implemented effectively and consistently in schools. According to the
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