As starvation ravages children in Turkana county and elsewhere, some of their well-fed middle-class counterparts in urban centres are ironically also facing malnutrition and health complications.
They may have a wide array of foods to choose from, but urban children are picking the ‘wrong’ ones; those that can ultimately lead to obesity, heart disease, high blood pressure, cancer and depression.
Amid growing awareness of the dangers of junk food, people who care about children — including consumer rights groups, doctors, nutritionists, parents, teachers, the government and NGOs — are worried.
“Junk food can be defined as pre-prepared or packaged food that has low nutritional value,” says Michael Mungoma, the Youth Education Network’s project coordinator.
His organisation provides consumer education to young people to help them make informed decisions.
Paediatrician Dr Florence Manguyu, whose clinic is at the Aga Khan University Hospital in Parklands, Nairobi, says urban schoolchildren are fatter and less energetic today than they were 20 years ago.
“They consume more junk food than they did before, mainly because such foods are more easily available now,” she says.
In August and September last year, YEN surveyed 1,232 pupils from 17 primary schools in Nairobi and Mombasa to highlight the foods that children in standard seven and standard eight eat.
Dr Manguyu says the pupils – the average age of the children surveyed was 14 – are about to sit their Kenya Certificate of Primary Education exam and need a nutritious balanced diet to study well and remember what they learn in class.
“Full concentration and focus help in remembrance and recall of what they have learnt,” she says.
Dr Manguyu says junk foods, which are low in nutrients and high in sugar, sodium and fats, actually reduce energy and concentration.
“Such unhealthy foods demand extra energy to process and digest, thus compromising the available energy for both physical and mental development of the growing child,” she says.
Mungoma says the so-called lifestyle diseases – obesity, heart disease, cancer – have been linked to the sugar, salt, transfats, acrylamide, food colouring and taste enhancers in junk food.
Dr Manguyu says junk foods are often addictive and promote unhealthy eating habits that can persist into adulthood, reducing life expectancy.
Children may not be aware of the health risks they are exposing themselves to but they do know that junk food is tasty, easily available, relatively cheap and even trendy.
That is why they like it and the reason more than 90 per cent of 14-year-olds in Mombasa and Nairobi eat chips every day, according to the YEN survey.
Eight out of 10 of them drink soda daily.
Seventy per cent of the children eat ice cream at school every day and 66 per cent eat chocolate.
The children also list sweets, biscuits, mandazi, samosa, bhajia and ‘smokies’ sausages as foods they consume regularly.
To their credit, they also snack on boiled eggs, milk, nuts, popcorn and chapati, which are not necessarily unhealthy. Most pupils eat the junk food at lunch time (62 per cent) and a similar fraction, 60 per cent, eat these foods at home, the survey says.
The Ministry of Health is concerned.
“This month we are starting a childhood obesity prevention programme. We will teach children about junk food so that they can know the dangers of consuming processed foods,” says Terrie Wefwafwa, the deputy nutrition officer in the ministry’s human nutrition and dietetic unit.
She says the “promotion” of junk foods like chips and soda in and around schools is “a big problem”.
The survey results bear her out as 86 per cent of the pupils say there is a kiosk or a hawker outside their school. Some 42 per cent say there is a kiosk in their school and 33 per cent are given these foods by their parents.
Wefwafwa says in the absence of a policy regulating the promotion of junk food one of the things the Health ministry can do at the moment is create awareness.
“The West has taken the cue from the World Health Organisation, which calls for tight regulation of fast food advertising to children. We don’t have such regulation but we can have educational measures to counteract advertising and promotion,” she says.
The Health ministry encourages school feeding programmes as a way of controlling pupils’ diet in affluent and hardship areas alike.
“We are developing regulation guidelines with the Ministry of Education on school feeding, specifying the types of meals that children should eat,” Wefwafwa says.
She encourages schools to contact her ministry to learn about the best diet for children at different levels.
The ministry is launching National Guidelines for Healthy Diets and Physical Activity later this year.
Mungoma says the government can do more to protect children, as consumers, from the harmful effects of junk food.
“Regulation regarding advertising to children and their access to junk foods needs a comprehensive framework in Kenya. It would be useful to harness recent developments following the enactment of the Consumer Protection Act 2012,” he says.
But the greatest responsibility for children’s health naturally lies with their parents or guardians.
Wefwafwa says that a sustainable healthy population is nurtured from a young age.
Indeed a University of Bristol study, the ‘Children of the 90s’, has found that children who ate a diet high in processed foods, salt, fat and sugar at age three made less progress in school between the ages of six and 10 compared to those who had healthier meals.
In other words, in addition to damaging physical health, junk food lowers intelligence.
The long-term health research project, also known as the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children, is tracking the development of 14,000 children born in 1991 and 1992 in Avon, UK.
Wefwafwa says parents should pack healthy lunch and snacks for their children in day schools instead of giving them money to buy food.
The good news is it’s never too late to change one’s diet and lifestyle.
“Health – physical and mental – can be improved. The earlier, the better,” Dr Manguyu says.