The recent World Health Day kicked off a year-long campaign to prioritise women’s longer-term health and well-being. Why does that matter to school catering teams right now? Because good nutrition for girls is crucial. It supports healthy growth and development and helps them reach their full potential in school as well as preparing them for womanhood.
Tess Warnes, allmanhall’s Registered Dietitian, explains that “Whilst teenage girls need about 25% less energy (in terms of calories) per day than boys of the same age, they require the same amount of most nutrients and more iron”.
Along with higher consumption of iron, teenage girls particularly need to include the following in their diets: vitamin B6, magnesium, vitamin B12, zinc, calcium, and iodine. For a full explanation of the essential nutrients that girls require, read our blog here.
This can be difficult for boarding school catering teams to manage when research indicates that teenage girls, particularly in the UK, often fall short on consuming the recommended daily amounts of fruits and vegetables and may consume too much saturated fat and sugar.
Working with a food procurement partner like allmanhall can help, as our Nutrition & Dietetics team can support you to help your students choose the nutritious option.
Take a burger for example. Teenagers would prefer a high-fat beef burger but swapping this for allmanhall’s plant-based Brighter Burger, created in collaboration with Redefine Meat and Epsom College, gives them more fibre, just as much protein, and it has a much lower carbon footprint. Read our case study here.
By offering nutritionally balanced alternatives to girls’ preferred meals, boarding school caterers will significantly boost their health
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