Nutrition education policy and education programmes for kindergarten and primary schools in the Netherlands.

In 1972 The Netherlands' Ministers of Public Health and of Education were strongly advised to formulate a health education policy and to start health education programmes for kindergarten and primary schools. Since then working groups, workshops and conferences were held to formulate objectives for a health-education policy and vast amounts of research money became available to study the content of such programmes and to evaluate the potential health benefits. It is not surprising that nutritionists became involved in health education right from the start. Leadership in the field of health education in the schools was shown by a team at Nijmegen University, Medical Faculty/Department of Social and Preventive Dentistry. At the end of the 1970s a new law for primary education was being formulated. One of the issues in this law is that each school should make a detailed school curriculum on which the law gives major outlines. One of these major outlines is that health education should be in the curriculum. In the first draft of the law, health education was formulated in general terms as the promotion of healthy behaviour. It included no specification on nutrition. At that moment the Nutrition Council put pressure on the Minister of Education to include a specification on nutrition in the paragraph dealing with health education. Notwithstanding this pressure, nothing changed in the general formulation of health education. The law was accepted in Parliament in 1981 and will become operational in 1985. At the same time as the new law on primary education was in preparation, the Minister of Public Health asked the Nutrition Council to formulate advice on what a healthy dietary pattern for the Dutch population should look like and how it could be promoted. The Nutrition Council decided that nutrition education in primary schools is one of the ways to promote healthy food habits. As a consequence it formulated advice that was published in November 1982, on the principles of nutrition education in primary schools. The main points of this advice are :