My birth month of July is also Nutrition Month so as I become older, I like to celebrate my birthday feeding healthy food to a group of children. This year, I celebrated with 50 pre-school children at our Rotary Club of Downtown Davao’s Center for Hope Day Care in Agdao, Davao City.
Before we ate, I read to the kids one of my favorite children’s book, “Si Joey at ang Gulay Gang (Joey and the Veggie Gang),” written by Beng Alba and illustrated by Kora Dandan-Albano. It’s always a box-office hit among children as they all relate to Joey, the little boy who hated eating vegetables until he met and was helped by the Gulay Gang.
I love reading about how vegetables help our bodies work better to kids because we were never really taught in school how nutrition works. We were simply told “just eat vegetables” without explaining how eating vegetables affect our bodies and minds. It is difficult to follow an order when you do not understand the why.
I believe if I learned the science of nutrition in school and if biology and chemistry were taught to me in an engaging manner using the interaction of the sun, the plants, and the cells in my body to teach how everything is related and part of a dynamic system, I would have been more equipped to make better, healthier choices in life.
If the “why” has been ingrained in me early and the environment surrounding me growing up made it easy and affordable for me to choose healthy food, I am sure we would have saved millions in medicines and hospitalizations all these years. But I am holding on to the hope that change is possible and many chronic lifestyle diseases are reversible by nutrition.
Knowing what I know now, I am convinced that we can still change things for the next generation. With many new research studies and new technology, we can design a better system that would support our children’s health. But we need to do it “big and fast, not small and slow,” as my mentor Irene Santiago likes to say.
I am not a big fan of banning things. Making things forbidden, especially in dealing with curious children, will only make them more desirable. So advocacy campaigns of telling kids to “just say no” (to drugs, alcohol, junk food, sex, etc.) have proven not to be very effective.
What I am proposing instead is to promote access to affordable healthy food in schools and communities. And if we are really serious about promoting nutrition, especially to children, then we must invest public funds to subsidize healthy school lunches in public schools.
Many research studies have shown that subsidized healthy school lunches have the following benefits: (1) decreased child food insecurity especially among low-income households; (2) developed healthier eating habits eating healthy school lunches, even compared to home-packed meals (baon) that tend to contain more sugar and saturated fat; (3) higher test scores and academic performance with economically disadvantaged students showing the greatest gains (improvement attributed to nutritional quality, not calorie intake); (4) reduced behavioral issues (less hyperactivity, absenteeism, and suspensions); (5) positive health outcomes like lowering obesity rates and malnutrition; (6) cost-effectiveness because it turns out subsidizing healthy school meals saves the government more than it will spend on subsidizing health care cost in treating children’s chronic diseases.
The Philippines has a national program for subsidized healthy school lunches known as the School-Based Feeding Program (SBFP). It is based on the “Masustansyang Pagkain para sa Batang Pilipino Act” (Republic Act No. 11037) passed in 2017.
However, the program only covers “undernourished children in public day care, kindergarten and elementary schools.” This means the focus of intervention is limited to wasted children who are already in critical levels of malnutrition. Children who are not classified as “wasted” can still be not getting proper nutrition and may still develop chronic illnesses later in life.
The SBFP also implemented the feeding program for a period of 120 days or four months only with initial funding of 16 pesos per child daily, which was found to be insufficient compared to global standards. The caloric provision of 300 kcal/meal also fell below World Health Organization (WHO) recommendations.
This school year, the Department of Education (DepEd) will expand its SBFP from 120 days to 220 days or for the entire academic calendar. According to DepEd Assistant Secretary Dexter Galban, funding for the program doubled to P11.7 billion in 2024 from P5.6 billion from the previous year. That should result in an increase of 25 pesos per child per day for the whole school year.
Based on the impact assessment made by the Philippine Institute for Development Studies (PIDS) covering school year 2013-2014, the government’s feeding program revealed mixed outcomes due to inconsistent program implementation.
It reported that schools relied heavily on parent volunteers and nongovernment organizations (NGOs) for meal preparation, leading to disparities in meal quality and resource allocation. Urban schools had better infrastructure than rural areas so there were many logistical challenges. There were also monitoring gaps caused by inaccurate nutritional status measurements and poor documentation. The program also faced issues of sustainability like low stakeholder engagement, lack of nutrition education, and composting of food wastes.
Successful feeding programs are those that are community-driven with consistent stakeholder engagement and are well-resourced. I believe Davao City can create and implement an expanded, more inclusive, and sustainable feeding program. We were able to do it with several groundbreaking public health programs like the anti-smoking, anti-firecracker, anti-aerial spraying programs. We have enough funds to make many services free for Davaoeños. Investing in our children’s health is a wise investment.
Based on last school year’s statistics, Davao City has 437 public schools and 213 private schools with a total of 650 schools serving K-12 students. Our city had 458,100 learners in K-12 in both public and private schools last school year.
Let us assume we will start feeding only 100,000 K-6 learners in public schools. Let us allocate 25 pesos per child per day. That will amount to P2.5 million a day multiplied by 220 days, we would need P550 million a year. I think the amount can be significantly reduced if we design an efficient system. If we mobilize private sector and civil society support to supplement government efforts, it is very doable. We can pilot a few schools first to see how it will work. Then we can be the first city in the country to do this. Trailblazing again.
If we are really serious about our children’s nutrition, we will find a way to do it. In the long run, we will end up cutting costs for medicines, hospitals, dialysis, and chemotherapy treatments. And we will gain so much more with a healthy and happy human resource pool to power our city’s growth and development. Now that is what “Life is Here” means.
