In 2015, Mathaino Diatrofi, in cooperation with the Department of Public Health of the National School of Public Health developed the pilot program “Raising Healthy Children” for pre-schools.
The pilot program was implemented based on the volunteer work of our board members and our dedicated consultants and volunteers.
Our Goals
Our main goal was to create a series of solutions in order to address the following issue: children in Greece do not follow the Mediterranean Diet and as a result childhood obesity is on the rise. Early childhood is a key time to develop healthy eating skills. At the same time, preschool nutrition policies can encourage healthy food choices during the school day, helping to tackle children obesity.
This pilot program aimed to investigate the following:
- The effectiveness of preventive actions targeted to preschools
- The ability of preschool entities to develop and implement nutrition policies
- The personal opinions of both parents and pre-school teachers
- The educational needs of both parents and pre-school teachers
This program was designed in line with the recommendations of Harvard School of Public Health & McKinsey: Overcoming Obesity and the guidelines of EU Action Plan on Childhood Obesity & WHO Europe: School and Nutrition Policy for Schools.
What We achieved
During the implementation of the “Raising Healthy Children” pilot program we had the luck to cooperate with the preschools “Paichnidagogio” and Moraitis School. From this cooperation we were able to achieve all of our goals and come to the conclusion that there is a great need to support pre-school entities in Greece, in the following areas:
- Implementing up-to-date nutrition, feeding and food service procedures
- Development of a contemporary nutritional policy
- Nutrition education for parents and pre-school teachers
- Implementing up-to-date feeding and nutrition education strategies
The Littlespoons Community program was based on this pilot program.
