BNF Healthy Eating Week aims to increase knowledge about healthy eating and wellbeing, physical activity, food provenance and cooking, by providing schools and workplaces with activities and informative resources to support the five daily challenges.
This year’s latest focus is on sleep, and resources will highlight that getting enough good quality sleep is a key element of healthy lifestyles. Where a poor night’s sleep can make you feel grumpy and irritable, regular lack of sleep can have a negative impact on our dietary choices including higher intakes of calories and fat. The BNF’s recent Task Force report, released in February 2019, highlighted that both lack of sleep, and poor quality and interrupted sleep, may be linked to an increased risk of heart disease, stroke, type 2 diabetes, obesity, and hypertension. Sleep is also involved in maintaining skills such as communicating well, memory and creative thinking.
Roy Ballam, Managing Director and Head of Education at the BNF said: “BNF Healthy Eating Week provides the perfect opportunity for schools, universities and businesses to take a step back from the hustle and bustle of everyday life, and truly focus on their health and wellbeing. Each year we introduce a new challenge, and with emerging research linking poor sleep quality to less healthy food choices and increased risk of obesity, we felt it was important to address this issue. BNF Healthy Eating Week registrants will receive a variety of resources containing information on our selected health and wellbeing themes, as well as some fun, educational activities to engage employees and students throughout the Week.”
BNF Healthy Eating Week is a valuable education initiative for teachers and young people - 4,600 schools and nurseries registered for last year’s event and more interest than ever was received from adults keen to be involved. Over 1,400 workplaces and universities participated, demonstrating the Week’s importance for informing adults about health and wellbeing too.
Ballam continued: “Promoting health is not only beneficial to employees, but to employers too – more and more workplaces are engaging with this concept every year. Approximately 131 million working days are lost to sickness absence, with 200,000 attributed to insufficient sleep in the UK each year. We hope that BNF Healthy Eating Week will help draw attention to some of these everyday health challenges and, in turn, help us along the path to resolving them too.”
For more information about BNF Healthy Eating Week 2019 and to register your nursery, school, college, university or workplace, please visit: www.nutrition.org.uk/healthyliving/hew/bnfhew19.html or www.foodafactoflife.org.uk.
