School health, nutrition and education for all: levelling the playing field

The compelling case for school health and nutrition and the long-term effects of preschool health and Nutrition on educational achievement are examined.

Abstract

This clearly structured textbook provides a good outline on the effectiveness of health and nutrition programmes in improving education and equity.The authors guide their reader carefully through the seven chapters providing evidence to build the argument for promoting school health, nutrition and education for all.Pivotal to their line of thought, the authors give the readers a view from different angles exploring the interactions between education, nutrition and health.While these different views add to the comprehensiveness they come at the expense of some repetition.The reader, however, can skip a section without losing the thread and the concise summaries, which are clearly set apart as text boxes, further help the reader to obtain a quick overview.The authors' main arguments to support health and nutrition programmes are reiterated in several places and are summarized here: (i) disease affects education throughout childhood; (ii) improving children's health and nutrition brings substantial benefits for education; (iii) improving health and nutrition brings greatest benefits to the poor and most vulnerable; and (iv) health and education reinforce one another.Their underlying rationale is that diseases that affect education are highly prevalent.Infants, pre-school and schoolchildren face many health challenges, such as pneumonia, malaria, measles, micro-and macronutrient deficiencies.Because these young children frequently suffer one or several of these problems concurrently, health and nutritional programmes focusing on this age group are extremely valid.Many of these diseases and deficiencies are preventable and, among the schoolchildren who bear the greatest burden, the most vulnerable ones are the poor.