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Recently a patient told me about the disorder she is suffering in her daily life due to the change in her children’s school day.
This has led me to write this article, since in recent months the continuous day has proliferated in schools, especially public ones, throughout our geography.
Surveys reveal that parents prefer split day. The centers tend to prefer the continuous one due to the adjustment of their staff’s schedules, and ultimately there is also a saving in the cost of electricity, dining room, etc., which is very good for the administration.
However, it must be said that these schedules are decided in each educational center, although the health administration would have to do with the matter for what I explain below.
Leaving aside the preferences of one or the other based on spending and their schedules, as this is a health and food space, I will talk about how this schedule affects nutrition of children and adolescents in a country as particular as ours.
Again, in general, they lose the same ones, our children. Why?
The Spanish diet consists of 2 main meals, breakfast and 2 snacks, known as lunch and snack.
How to link a continuous schedule with our lifestyle?
That is the difficult equation, the differences between areas, the large urban centers, the influence of the climate, the hours of sunshine, the character, the customs, the siesta, the productive system, the geographical distribution, the traditions …, too many factors to be able to align them and above all to balance them from a nutritional point of view.
The paradox of Nutrition and work-life balance
I won’t say if one is better than the other. Both well done are good nutritionally, it is not advisable to mix them, and if so, the alimentación usually gets the worst of it.
It goes without saying that childhood and adolescence are critical stages from the point of view of food, in that growth depends on it and is also marked for life.
An example: a child who does not have the necessary calcium intake and is sedentary until adolescence is much more likely to develop osteoporosis than a well-nourished and active one, since it is until this age that the bone has to store up nutrients, to reach the maximum bone mass peak.
As we can see, correct nutrition at these ages is a basic, fundamental fact, and I am not exaggerating anything when I say that it is just as important as mathematics. Well prepared but poorly nourished. Future worker with health problems, in short low production. This is how history could be written.
Breakfast is the most important thing, without hesitation …
There is a study, the ENKID, heavy weight among the different studies carried out, which reveals how badly Spanish children and teenagers eat breakfast, if at all.
And by the way, it also reveals that the low supply of sugar to the brain in the early hours of the day can have negative consequences on academic results.
The result of this study is bad in itself, taking into account the traditional Spanish diet, in which the correct breakfast must consist of dairy, fruit and complex carbohydrate (such as cereals), but the problem increases with the change of schedules, since too much time passes until lunch, so an unbalanced and insufficient or non-existent breakfast will have worse consequences.
Adding lunches, which on so many occasions do not complement the diet well but are endowed with undesirable fats, the result will be even worse and the meal will become an act of survival, since it will be reached with a state of great appetite, which usually has an impact on eating very fast and high amounts, in intakes that are usually not very varied.
How many times will you be tempted to eat something before you get home?
Surely many, which unbalanced nutritionally the diet. The late meal overlaps with the snack and the problem drags on throughout the day. With all this we can only expect a worsening in the already very bad data on childhood overweight and obesity.
I have thought it appropriate to talk about the problem that is coming because, as a parent and a health professional, my protective instinct is increased when it comes to childhood.
As a citizen, I see our future society at risk.
This problem is actually already well known in the work environment of adults, who suffer similar consequences when they mix European working hours (not to mention endless hours), with customs typical of our country, and instead of solving it, now we put the children in the garlic too.
There are not a few organizations of different health groups that have already raised the alert, and in a recent article in a national newspaper it echoed the opinion of pediatricians rejecting the continuous day, because they believe that it harms the health of children .
It seems that the percentage of contribution of the parents’ votes on the decision of the type of working day could be increased in future courses by opinion of some regional council.
If this is the case at the entire national level, it could be possible to reverse the situation, which from a health point of view (and why not say it, economically in the medium and long term) would surely be positive.
And is that all that calls itself Reconciling work and family life, in our country it needs a thorough review, since we take care of the diet to contribute our grain of sand, those of us who really believe that a better world is possible, with healthy eating habits.