Healthy Start Briefing April 2025 Food Foundation and First Steps Nutrition Trust

Cost of Living re

March 2023 report in collaboration with Centre for Food Policy

What we need to do better in the first 1000 days

Swansea University conducted research with 1,307 families with babies aged 0-12 months to find out more about how they feed their babies, where they see adverts for infant milks,

what they pick up from the adverts, and how this might impact on their feeding journey.

The questionnaires were filled in online between October and December 2019 by a selfselected group of families recruited through social media. While this was not a nationally representative sample, it does tell us something about what families see and believe when it comes to the marketing of infant milks.

In 2019 First Steps Nutrition Trust commissioned Swansea University to undertake an evaluation of parents’ perceptions of marketing of infant milks from a UK perspective. Research in other countries such as Australia has already identified misconceptions in the use and benefits of infant milks based on different marketing techniques. We wanted to establish whether similar patterns were occurring in the UK, how this affected purchasing behaviour, and the support that parents needed in formula feeding their baby. To do this we explored the experiences of new parents in relation to the infant milk adverts they had encountered, perceptions of these adverts and infant feeding needs and decisions.

The aim of this guide is to provide support to families to help them to get the most out of the Healthy Start scheme in England, Wales and Northern Ireland, or the Best Start Foods scheme in Scotland. The guide provides a range of healthy family recipes using ingredients that can be bought through the Healthy Start or Best Start Foods schemes, and shows how these can feed the whole family.

This report summarises the development of the Healthy Start scheme in the UK, and looks at why a welfare food scheme is important and what has happened since the Healthy Start scheme was introduced in 2006.

This report examines the progress that has been made towards defining what a healthy, sustainable diet might look like for developed countries, and in particular examines the implications of this for children under the age of 5 years in the UK. It summarises current thinking on healthy and sustainable diets and current advice on eating sustainably and the potential issues this might raise for supporting young children to eat well in the UK.

This guide aims to support others to produce their own practical food photo resources. It is designed for dietitians and registered public health nutritionists who know how to work with dietary reference values, food composition data, recipe analysis and practical nutrition guidelines for population groups.

In this unprecedented time during the coronavirus

outbreak, the need for continued support for infant

feeding has come into sharp focus. With babies being one of the most vulnerable groups in our populations, we must ensure everything possible is being done to maximise protection and minimise risk in both the short and long term. A number of weaknesses with regard to how we feed and care for babies have come to light during the outbreak and local authorities are having to respond to these. Therefore, Unicef UK and First Steps Nutrition Trust have partnered together with the National Infant Feeding Network (NIFN), a network of over 700 infant feeding specialists, to produce this child rights-focused guidance for local authorities to ensure babies and families are protected during this crisis.