Healthy children, healthy nation — tackling the obesity problem

The high and growing incidence of obesity among young children and adolescents is an alarming trend throughout the Caribbean. Influencing eating behaviours in early childhood to tackle poor diets and inadequate physical activity, however, can have a huge impact on children’s health well into adulthood. This approach has been endorsed by the Caribbean Regional Food and Nutrition Security Policy. Evidence suggests, however, that to improve children’s diets, an integrated approach is needed, including improving school meals by adding more fruit and vegetables, restricting sales of unhealthy food and drink in the vicinity of schools, and nutrition education.

The Farm to Fork project followed just such an approach, focusing on St Kitts-Nevis and Trinidad and Tobago. Researchers worked with smallholder farmers to produce fruit and vegetables for school lunch programs and helped launch nutrition education programs targeting primary schools in Trinidad.

Read the full story of change: Caribbean health: Healthy children, healthy nation — tackling the obesity problem (PDF, 577KB)

This document is part of the Stories of Change series that shares some of the emerging outcomes from research supported in Latin America and the Caribbean by the Canadian International Food Security Research Fund, a program of Canada's International Development Research Centre, undertaken with support from the Government of Canada, provided through Global Affairs Canada.