New 5-a-day website aims to boost fruit intake
The Department of Health has launched a new website designed to help parents to provide their children with a healthy diet.
The 5-a-day website provides a variety of methods to encourage children to eat healthily.
These include online games such as Super Sumo Smoothie, which features sumo wrestlers doing battle over pieces of fruit, including pears, pineapples, peaches, bananas and mangos.
Once the sumo wrestlers have battled it out, kids who access the site are presented with a smoothie recipe and relevant food facts to accompany it.
Launching the site, Health Minister Melanie Johnson, said: “Super Sumo Smoothie is a fun way of communicating health messages to young people in an educational and engaging way.
“By using the web, a medium that many youngsters are comfortable with, we can provide them with a range of information, tips and games all designed to help them make healthy choices about what they eat.”
Parents are also catered for through the “vegetable makeover” pages, which provide nutritional information on vegetables, including tips on how to make them more interesting.
View the site at www.5aday.nhs.uk
The site comes in response to focus group research which suggested that clear and helpful information could encourage the public to eat more healthily. Upping fruit and vegetable intake, particularly among children, is seen as key to halting the rise in obesity.
