Munch And Move Case Study

The Munch and Move program is a NSW wide program that aims to promote and increase healthy eating practices and physical activity in children aged 0 to 5 years. Thus the Munch and Move program forms part of the ‘NSW Healthy Eating and Active Living Strategy: Preventing overweight and obesity in NSW 2013-2018’ and is accordance with the Premier’s Priority to reduce childhood obesity by 5% over 10 years starting from 2015. Therefore the Munch and Move program’s target audience is early childhood workers. The aim of the program is to help the staff the early childhood workers in preschools and other early childhood education and care service centers (ECECS) to foster strategies that promote healthy eating, physical activity and fundamental movement skills in

Lunch box audits are fundamental to the Munch and Move program because national data have demonstrated that high energy nutrient poor foods in a child’s lunchbox accounted for 1/3 of children aged 0-5 daily energy intake (Rangan, Randall, Hector, Gill & Webb, 2008). Thus these high energy nutrient poor foods displace core foods, which have severe negative impacts on the nutritional status of young children, contributing to increasing rates of obesity (Webb et al., 2006). Thus according to the Commonwealth Scientific Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) (2007) a many children aged 2-3 are not meeting the benchmark on a numerous essential nutritional requirements, for example dietary fiber intake for this age group was the lowest at 15.5g/day, which may hinder the child’s growth a development (CSIRO, 2007). In essence the Munch and Move lunchbox audits involved childcare teachers categorizing lunch boxes into three main categories that is: balanced, which contained at least a sandwich or home cooked meal and either