A fried food ban, limited sausages and no honey for breakfast: why new school food standards come with a side of diet culture

For the first time in a decade the government has introduced new school food standards. But while the potential health benefits of the new rules are already being applauded, are we overlooking the damage that this could do to children’s relationship with food and their bodies?

Body image and eating behaviour are deeply linked. Body dissatisfaction is associated with reduced engagement in health promoting behaviours, including lower physical activity, harmful food restriction and unhealthy relationships with food. Building a genuinely healthy relationship with food is one of the clearest ways we can help children treat their bodies with care. This is why the Body Happy Org has concerns about the new standards.

What is changing with the new standards?

The Department for Education's revised School Food Standards were announced on 14 September and many schools started following them straight away, but they officially come into force from September 2027, subject to Parliamentary approval. They make sweeping changes in what schools can serve:

• Deep-fried food banned outright: chips, wedges and hash browns capped at twice a week and must be oven-baked, not fried.

• Restricted processed sausages, chicken nuggets and ham: only once per week and must be accompanied by fruit or vegetables.

• More fibre: at least half of pasta dishes must be wholewheat and the fibre requirement for bread has increased.

• Protein redefined: now includes pulses (beans, lentils, chickpeas) alongside meat, poultry and cheese.

• Honey, syrups and chocolate spread banned at breakfast: treated the same as other free sugars.

• Sweetened desserts and baked goods capped: once a week in primaries, twice a week in secondaries.

• More plant-based options: including expanded plant-based drink and snack choices.

• Greater transparency: schools will publish menus and food policies online and appoint a food governor.

Where the risk lies

While the new standards are prescriptive about what’s on plates, they do not focus on how food should be talked about. Diet culture has been demonising some foods and glorifying others for decades and implementing bans and limitations on certain foods can serve to increase its grip.

Although the tightened standards are aimed at improving children’s health and ensuring they have access to better quality food, there is a risk that they could reinforce ‘good/bad’ food language. This can harm kids’ relationships with food - and, ironically, their health. The rules also risk flattening the complexity of health into being all about individual food choices and willpower, while ignoring the urgent issue of poverty and food insecurity, which decades of evidence shows has a hugely damaging impact on child health. 

What's more, there’s a risk that these rules and the way they’re implemented could further marginalise certain groups. This includes neurodivergent children, who may already struggle with certain foods or textures, children with Avoidant Restrictive Food Intake Disorder (ARFID), kids living in poverty and those in bigger bodies.

“What is this teaching children?” asks Body Happy Org founder Molly Forbes. “They think about things in black and white, so if you tell a child food is ‘good’ or ‘healthy’ they take that literally and think it applies to the person eating it too. You tell them food is ‘bad’ or ‘unhealthy’ and the opposite happens. When applied in the wider context of increasingly aggressive cultural anti-fat bias, individualised notions of health focused on personal responsibility and rising inequality, my fear is that these new rules are just another way children will internalise the idea their body - or the bodies of those around them - is wrong.

“The impact of this cultural body shame is already hugely harmful for kids' health - just earlier this year the NEU found that almost half of primary school teachers are seeing kids with eating disorders. The way we talk about food, and teach kids about food, matters. This is a public health crisis and should be treated with just as much urgency as the quality of food kids are eating. We can argue for food justice and better food regulation, without using weight stigma or attitudes laced in diet culture as the justification for tightened food standards.”

How to talk about the new school food standards without diet culture 

At the Body Happy Organisation, we think it’s really important to take a poverty-informed, eating-disorder-informed and weight-stigma-informed approach to any conversations about food. We can talk about food as a way of nourishing and caring for our bodies and promote tuning into how food makes us feel. But we can do this in a food positive way without demonising certain types of food - one of our favourite sayings is “all foods fit”! With this in mind, we urge schools to think really carefully about how these new standards are communicated to children and young people - ideally through a food-positive lens:

• Keep moral language out of it: there’s no need to tell children honey is ‘bad’ or fried food is ‘naughty’, just serve the new menu and let food be food.

• Build in flexibility for children with sensory sensitivities, allergies or anxiety around new foods - a new menu should never become a new source of mealtime distress.

• Use the transparency requirements as an opportunity: a lead food governor and published food policy are a natural home for a school’s stance on food positivity, alongside nutrition. Check out our template lunchbox policy poster, included in our free Body Happy taster resource library, for support with this.

• Keep teaching food’s other roles: culture, celebration, family, enjoyment.

• Health is about more than diet: movement, rest, connection and feelings all count too. 

• Give consistent low-pressure exposure opportunities: food play, cooking classes or even growing veggies from seeds all allow children and young people to get hands on with food.

• Talk about where food comes from: arguably way more impactful for children’s relationship with it than teaching them to fear certain foods or put others on a pedestal.

We define healthy eating as having a healthy relationship with food. And that means eating a wide range of food (if we can access it and are able to), eating when we’re hungry and stopping when we're full. We should remember that food is more than just fuel (we are humans not cars) and not give food moral value. There isn't one single way of eating that fits all people. Because we all have different nutritional needs, enjoy eating different things and live in cultures with different foods - and that's something to celebrate not regulate.