99% of Aussie kids don’t eat enough vegetables – and their parents aren’t much better

The latest report on the state of the nation’s eating habits has just been released by the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, and the news is not good.

The report, titled ‘Nutrition across the life stages’, draws on data gathered by the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) including surveys on physical activity, eating habits, and the prevalence of overweight and obesity across the entire Australian population.

Here are some of the highlights – or, more to the point, lowlights – of the report:

• 99% of Australian children between the ages of 2 and 18 do not eat enough vegetables, according to Australian Dietary Guidelines (ADGs).
• Only children aged 2–8 meet the daily ADG recommendation for fruit intake.
• Among men aged 19–50, 74.1% don’t meet the ADG recommendation for fruit and 98.3% fall short of the  vegetable intake recommendation.
• Among women aged 19–50, 80% aren’t eating sufficient fruit and 94% don’t make the cut for vegetables.
• About one-third of Australians’ energy (kilojoule/calorie) intake comes from discretionary food – that is, foods and beverages that are high in energy but low in nutrients required to sustain health – such as cakes, biscuits, confectionery, pastries, potato chips, soft drinks and alcoholic drinks.
• The high intake of these ‘foodless foods’ results in excess consumption of added sugars, saturated fat and salt: 11% of the energy intake of adults aged comes from added sugars (averaging 65 g per day) and 12% from saturated and trans fats, while average intake of sodium is 2720 mg per day – well above the adequate intake level of 460–920 mg/day.
• Teenagers are doing even worse than adults: they get more than 40% of their daily energy intake from discretionary food.

It’s not just our eating habits that royally suck. After hitting an activity peak in early adult life, we get fatter and lazier as we get older:

• Only 55% of adults aged 19–30, 47% of those aged 31-50, and 39% of 51-70 year olds, do the recommended amount of physical activity (a paltry 150 minutes per week).
• 47% of 19-30 year olds, 64% of 31-50 year olds, and 74% of 51-70 year olds are overweight or obese.

Frighteningly, on top of their appalling eating habits, teenagers are the least physically active of all age groups:

• Less than 1 in 5 (16%) children aged 14–18 do the recommended amount of physical activity each day (at least 60 minutes) and almost one-third (30%) are overweight or obese.

And finally, in an indictment of the inequity of our sociopolitical structure, how wealthy you are and where you live plays a large role in your health, weight and activity level:

• People living in more affluent areas and in major cities are more likely to eat healthful diets, be physically active and within the healthy weight range than people living in lower socioeconomic regions and more remote parts of Australia.

If all of that sounds bad, I would say the situation is actually far worse. Bear in mind that the ADG recommends only 5 servings of vegetables per day for teenage girls and women, and 5.5-6 servings for teenage boys and men. For fruit, only 2 servings will fulfill ADG recommendations for both males and females 9 years and up.

What’s a serving? A measly 75 g of vegetables, or roughly 1/2 cup cooked and 1 cup raw leafy vegetables; and just 150 g of fruit. To meet ADG recommendations, therefore, you would only need to eat 375-450 g of vegetables and 300 g of fruit per day.

Are you kidding me???? My lunchtime salad alone typically contains 400 g of raw vegetables; my dinner always contains at least the same weight in cooked vegetables.

If you’re eating as little fruit and vegetables as this – and remember, most Australians are failing to meet even these pathetic targets – then, by definition, you’re eating too much high energy density, low nutrient food… because something else has to be taking up all the space on your plate that isn’t being occupied by fruits and vegetables.

This brings me to a point which the authors of the AIHW report skirt around, without directly addressing: the problem with the way most people – including most nutrition scientists – think about nutrition is that they focus on nutrients rather than on food.

Professor T. Colin Campbell, in his intellectual tour de force Whole: Rethinking the science of nutrition, characterised this focus on nutrients as emerging from a paradigm of reductionism, whereas a focus on dietary patterns emanates from a wholistic paradigm of nutrition.

While, as Campbell is at pains to point out, reductionist research is necessary to advance our understanding in any field of enquiry, if it is not embedded in a wholistic framework it almost invariably leads to scientific misunderstanding, and to costly, fruitless and frequently counterproductive interventions – such as fortifying hyperprocessed breakfast cereals with synthetic vitamins and minerals, or adding calcium to sugar-laden dairy desserts.

You see, it may seem counterintuitive, but the report concluded that despite our generally atrocious diets, Australians generally meet the recommendations for intake of individual nutrients (with some notable exceptions, including fibre, which was found to be below adequate intake levels in all age groups except children aged under 3, and boys aged 4-8).

Australians are fatter and sicker than we’ve ever been in our nation’s history, yet we’re not, broadly speaking, deficient in the nutrients that most of us are concerned about.

This underscores a critical point, that I’m constantly emphasising to my clients: it’s our overall nutritional pattern that determines our health outcomes – including our weight, current health status, and risk of developing chronic diseases in future – not our intake of specific macronutrients (protein, fat and carbohydrate) or micronutrients (vitamins, minerals, antioxidants and phytochemicals).

As a nation, we’re simply eating too much of the wrong kinds of food, and not enough minimally processed plant foods such as fresh fruits, vegetables, whole grains and legumes – which makes the inadequate fibre intakes unsurprising. No amount of food fortification can compensate for this deficiency in real food.

A final note: This morning, as I was planning this article, my 13 year old daughter informed that a) the recipe being demonstrated in her Food Technology class (compulsory for all Year 8 students in NSW schools) was rocky road – yes, that calorie-bomb concoction of chocolate, marshmallows and biscuits, with absolutely zero nutritional value – and b) her school was having a bake sale to raise money for a local school for kids with special needs.

I was speechless. What is the point of having Australian Dietary Guidelines that aim to increase consumption of wholesome foods such as fruits, vegetables and whole grains, and physical activity guidelines that aim to get Australians to get off the couch and move their bodies, when both the overt and hidden curricula of our schools are undermining these guidelines?

How about teaching kids how to choose, prepare and cook vegetables in appetising ways? Even better, how about tearing up some of the unused grounds that most schools have, and planting vegetable gardens in their stead, so that kids actually see what they look like when they’re growing, and get some healthy outdoor exercise in the process of tending them?

How about holding a walkathon to raise funds, rather than flogging piles of sugar, white flour and partially hydrogenated vegetable fat masquerading as food to raise a few bucks for the special needs kids, while contributing to zits and big behinds in the more privileged ones?

No wonder so many parents – ourselves included, as of 2019 – are opting to pull their children out of mainstream education, which seems to me to function more as a means of indoctrinating children into the system of mindless consumerism and exploitative capitalism that is well on track to render our planet uninhabitable and destroy us, and countless other species, within a century.

Back in 1970 – a year before I was born – Crosby, Stills and Nash urged that we should ‘Teach the children well‘, but as a nation, we’re failing our kids miserably. We’re setting a bad example for them by neglecting to teach them basic cooking skills, depriving them of family meals consisting of home-cooked food, and addicting them to calorie dense/nutrient poor junk food at an early age; and in so doing we’re paving the road for them to become the fattest and sickest generation we’ve ever seen… and even to have a shorter life expectancy than their parents.

There’s only one way to avert this train wreck: change the way you eat. Start by getting the processed food out of your fridge and pantry, wiping Uber Eats off your phone contacts, and getting more plants on your plate.

Need help with getting those plants on your plate? My EmpowerEd health and nutrition education program includes Healthy Eating 101: How to plan meals, organise your kitchen, shop and cook for optimal health and nutrition; and Empowered Eating, a video course which takes you through the ‘why’, ‘what’ and ‘how’ of eating for health, vitality and longevity… including how to prepare simple plant-based recipes that everyone in your family will love. Your first month of membership is free! Register for your free 1 month trial here.