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Focus on Wellness education in schools

When children are taught and empowered to make conscious healthy eating and lifestyle choices, they can positively influence people around them

There is an increasing awareness among schools in the UAE on the need for implementing wellness and happiness initiatives. This certainly is a positive and an encouraging sign. Schools are doing their part to spread the message that exercise and good nutrition programmes are key to well-being and healthy lives.
Children have the potential to bring transformation in the community. When they are taught and empowered to make conscious healthy eating and lifestyle choices, they can positively influence people at home and those around them. These healthy habits that they establish during school years will stay with them forever and help them lead a positive nourishing and disease-free life during adulthood. This is my main intention behind working on wellness initiatives in schools.
The issues that influence healthy eating vary from primary, middle to senior school. In the primary school, parents have to handle picky eaters, deal with power struggle during breakfast, lunch or dinnertime and resistance to eating lunch at school. In the beginning of the middle school, children are more exposed to snacks in canteens and they are given pocket money to buy them.

While they enjoy this freedom, if proper interventions to ensure healthy eating are not in place in the school environment, it may fail to create the desired result. In middle school and high school, we see a multitude of factors influencing healthy eating habits such as hormonal issues, peer pressure and fitting in syndrome, falling trap to false diet myths, obsession with body image and poor self-esteem, obesity and peer discrimination, stress, social relationships, lack of sleep and emotional bingeing.
Wellness education in school should relate to different stages of cognitive development among students and cater to their requirements and their lives, besides addressing cultural diversity. For example, primary school children are more receptive to sight, touch and feel experiences. Hence the strategy here is to increase their exposure to many healthy foods through farmers' markets in schools, kitchen garden projects, and visits to local grocery stores.

As they move to the middle school, they will be able to comprehend abstract concepts. This is when you teach them through informative sessions to read food labels and the nutrient contents of foods. In the last phase of middle school, when they are in their pre-teens, students can relate more to the connection between nutrition and health. When it comes to high school, wellness education strategies should focus on enhancing individual responsibility for making conscious healthy choices and in assessing their own relation to food and lifestyle behaviours. They should help them in setting their goals for their holistic well-being and in achieving those goals.
Schools should incorporate lessons and conduct awareness sessions on the psychology of eating, mind and body connect hormonal balance, digestive health, eating disorders, preparing healthy convenient balanced meals and snacks, and how different primary needs like love, social and community relationships, non-fulfilment in career, spiritual practices and sleep patterns can affect food consumption and choices.
Just as working out in a gym or hanging out in cafes and fast food outlets is cool, eating healthy food is also something cool. This is the change in attitude that we need to bring about in the younger generation.
Schools, no doubt, are an integral component of the social environment that help in building the foundation for leading a healthy life. However, schools cannot achieve wellness goals on their own.
There are other cultural factors that have a large influence on food-related beliefs, values and practices. Families, malls, restaurants, the food industry, social clubs and the media have an influence on eating behaviours. But it is not easy to get everyone together and talk the same language on wellness and healthy eating. Hence, it is important that families take a bigger role and responsibility in working with the schools to encourage healthy eating behaviours and reflect the healthy eating messages conveyed in schools.
No amount of classroom teaching on wellness can help. It has to be reflected in what is being practised at home and school.
Having an academic understanding of what healthy eating and lifestyle choices is one thing. But what ultimately matters is whether students are able to apply what has been taught in school and at home in making responsible and informed choices for better health in all environments, not just now, but in their later phases of life.
Each student is a wellness ambassador to the community at large and has the power and resources to bring transformation through the choices that he or she makes.