I.Metshin on healthy nutrition

The issue of eating behavior of children and adults is still new for Russia, this topic is not fully explored.

If the child has a healthy appetite, then mothers and grandmothers would be happy. This is understandable – we all overwhelmingly come from the Soviet times, we remember the queues for food stamps well.

Our family had three sons and a dad; four men had to be dined in the absence of enough food. We had a farmland, and we ate pies with cabbage, with carrots, with apples, with potatoes. I always wanted to eat meat. Frankly speaking: when I was a student and went to Moscow for the first time, and we entered the store, I saw sausages that were available without food stamps. I thought “What a happiness, the Muscovites are so lucky!” Moreover, I decided: “I will graduate from the law faculty, will work in the prosecutor's office, and with my first paycheck I will buy a saveloy and sausages and eat!”.  I am a little ashamed of these thoughts now, but it shows our eating behavior at that time. With my first salary, however, I bought none of either.

Now we try not to eat sausages. If I had been told about it then, I would have decided that it was unreal.

A whole generation of Russians, residents of the former Soviet Union, did not starve, but had a limited food basket. Therefore, it is necessary to retrain children now, and this is our task – to explain, to show that full stores or refrigerators are not equivalent to health and healthy nutrition.

We hear from WHO experts that the issue of obesity becomes crucial in the world. In the USA, almost half of the population, including children, is obese. This is a serious number. Obesity leads to a whole bunch of diseases, including diabetes mellitus. This is the case when we need to learn from the mistakes of others, to teach our children, our future generation to proper nutrition and a healthy lifestyle.

In Kazan, serious results have been achieved in the development of infrastructure for school nutrition, and work in this direction does not stop. It is important to continue the dialogue with parents that we have managed to build, but this work should be carried out more widely – to talk not only about whether hot meals or not, whether the menu suits children, but in cooperation with them and the teachers to promote the idea of healthy nutrition for children. All this is very important, and we will continue to pay great attention to this issue, including the Healthy Society program.