The new Policies and interventions to create healthy school food environments by the World Health Organization (WHO) aim to support governments and key stakeholders by providing evidence-based recommendations to improve school food environments, guide advocacy efforts, inform policy implementation, and identify research gaps. The guideline has been launched today and focuses on policies and interventions that influence which foods and beverages are provided, sold, promoted, or consumed in and around schools.
This guideline is highly relevant, as healthy eating is essential for lifelong health and well-being. In contrast, unhealthy diets represent a major global public health challenge and are closely linked to malnutrition, obesity, and diet-related noncommunicable diseases. Schools play a critical role in shaping children’s and adolescents’ eating habits and in reducing health and nutrition inequalities.
The WHO guideline outlines the following key recommendations:
Foods and beverages provided, served, sold, or consumed at schools should be safe and contribute to healthy diets.
School food provision should be used to increase the consumption of foods and beverages that support a healthy diet.
Nudging interventions that modify the school food environment should be implemented to encourage healthier food choices, purchases, and consumption.
Nutrition standards or rules should be established and implemented to increase the availability, purchase, and consumption of healthy foods and beverages at school, while reducing access to unhealthy options.
Taken together, these recommendations provide governments and decision-makers a framework for action. Importantly, they highlight that countries do not need to start from scratch, but can rely on this guideline as a practical resource to design and implement improvements in school food environments. The guideline reinforces the importance of guaranteeing healthy food environments in schools as a public health priority.
Although the recommendations apply to all schools—public and private, pre-primary, primary, and secondary, and across low-, middle-, and high-income countries—the WHO emphasizes the need for adaptation to local contexts. Countries should consider existing policies, legal and governance frameworks, nutritional needs, sociocultural and socioeconomic conditions, locally available foods, food security, climate change vulnerabilities, dietary customs, and available infrastructure, resources, and capacities.
School Food Environment in Mexico
Mexico has participated in the launch of this guideline, showcasing recent advances in improving school food environments in basic education. Strategies highlighted included free online courses and seminars on healthy eating and healthy lifestyles for basic education teachers. It was also emphasized that the recent reform of the General Education Law, for the first time, prohibits ultra-processed foods in schools. This includes the restriction on the advertising, promotion, sponsorship, or distribution of non-compliant products within school premises. Finally, national initiatives such as Vive Saludable, Vive Feliz promote healthy eating through nationwide interventions.
In Mexico several actions have been developed to strengthen the school food environments and support the health and well-being of children and adolescents. Further steps need to consider their effective implementation and the opportunities to improve them, grounded on the new global standards for healthy school food.