For the first time the World Health Organization has issued global, evidence‑based guidance on healthy school food environments, urging countries to make schools a pivot for preventing non‑communicable diseases and shaping lifelong diets. WHO Director‑General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus emphasised that food consumed at school “can have a profound impact on learning, and lifelong consequences for health.”

The guidance arrives amid shifting burdens: in 2025 global childhood overweight and obesity surpassed underweight for the first time. Around one in 10 school‑aged children and adolescents were obese in 2025, while one in five, about 391 million, were overweight. Diabetes now affects over 800 million people globally and complicates one in six pregnancies, WHO reports.

As of October 2025, 104 Member States had policies on healthy school food, but only 48 had rules restricting marketing of foods high in sugar, salt, or unhealthy fats. WHO recommends increasing availability of whole grains, fruits, nuts, and pulses, while limiting free sugars, saturated fats, and sodium; it promotes “nudging” interventions, packaging, placement, and portion changes, to steer choices. The agency pledged technical assistance and knowledge‑sharing to help governments implement the standards, aiming to reduce chronic disease risk from childhood onward.