## Part 2 Maintaining and Improving Children’s Health

Health issues such as drug abuse among schoolchildren and lifestyle diseases have garnered attention in recent years, and learning about health will play an increasingly important role in future.

Maintaining and improving mental and physical health first requires that children themselves learn to follow the “Three Principles of Health”: a balanced diet, appropriate exercise, and sufficient rest/sleep. Children must become aware of the value of health, adopt an attitude of treating themselves well, learn ways of coping with stress, and gain the practical ability to cut themselves off from things that are not healthy. To those ends, children must learn about health to gain correct knowledge and better understanding about health on a day-to-day basis and put into practice the measures necessary to maintain and improve their health over their lifetimes.

## 1 Promoting Food Education

The changes in the social environment in recent years affecting eating habits have distorted children’s consumption of nutrients, produced irregular eating patterns such as skipping breakfast, and increased the tendency towards obesity (Figure 1-1-2, Foreword Diagram 4).

For children in their growing years, a balanced diet is essential for nurturing a sound mind and body and is extremely important also because it has a major impact on the formation of desirable eating habits.

For that reason, children need to learn to determine for themselves how to ensure nutritious meals and how to assess the quality and safety of food products based on accurate knowledge and information so that they are able to manage their own diets.

Diet-related issues are primarily a matter for families, but eating habits continue to change rapidly against a background of changing social circumstances and food product distribution.

Given this situation, MEXT will be promoting food education in schools in cooperation with families and communities, centered on the diet and nutrition teacher system to be launched in April 2005.

## (1) Establishing a Diet and Nutrition Teacher System

School guidance on diet has thus far been carried out by school nutritionists during school meal times, lessons, and grade-specific activities, but no adequately clear-cut guidance system has yet been established, resulting in a wide disparity in the approaches taken by individual communities and schools. Changes in the circumstances surrounding children’s diets in recent years, however, have created a greater need to establish effective guidance systems at schools to improve guidance on diet. In light of the January 2004 “Establishment of a Diet Guidance System” recommendations by the Central Council for Education, a bill to establish a diet and nutrition teacher system (“Bill to Partially Amend the School Education Law”) was submitted to the 159th Ordinary Session of the Diet, approved and passed unanimously on May 14, 2004 and promulgated on May 21. The diet and nutrition teacher system will be inaugurated in April 2005.

## 1 ) Duties of diet and nutrition teachers

Diet and nutrition teachers, with both educational qualifications and nutritional expertise, are responsible for providing guidance on diet and managing school meal programs in an integrated fashion (Figure