On November 14 Festival for Children, organized by the UN Children’s Fund UNICEF with the support of the French Embassy, French Institute, and Deputy Prime Minister Serhii Tihipko has launched for the second time in Kyiv. It was dedicated to the 20th anniversary of Ukraine’s ratification of the Convention on the Rights of Children. The festival will last until November 19 and will include a display of French animated films (some of them will be about the rights of children), master classes on making animated films, and cooking shows. The festival visitors will also be able to enjoy the art works by Yevhenia Hapchynska.
Outside the holiday program specialists of UNICEF did not forget about every day life of the younger generation, when even more attention should be paid to, first of all, healthy eating habits and healthy life style of kids. Those are quite big issues in Ukraine nowadays, especially with iodine.
Ukraine is not an African country, where children suffer from hunger, but there is still a serious problem with lack of essential trace elements in food. I mean iodine here. When children do not consume enough iodine their IQ level drops. Each year 80 percent of infants fall under the risk of iodine deficiency because during pregnancy their mothers did not have enough iodine and then the situation doesn’t change and there is lack of iodine in both mother’s and child’s nutrition. It can lead to serious mental and intellectual problems both in child and the country as a whole. It has been proved that lack of iodine causes the drop of IQ level by 15 percent. International organizations have detected that Ukraine annually looses 43 billion dollars due to lack of productivity caused by iodine deficit. World medicine recognized iodine deficiency the greatest threat to the mental faculties of man. “But the intellectual disaster can be easily prevented. In order to do this, the regular salt should be replaced with iodized salt in the daily diet,” said Yukie Mokuo, head of UN Children’s Fund UNICEF in Ukraine at the opening of the festival.
For a long time there has been a need in Ukraine to approve a national program to overcome iodine deficiency, as it was done in 130 countries. President’s Commissioner for Children’s Rights Yurii Pavlenko emphasized such a step: “The time has come to adopt mandatory iodization of salt.” But Ukrainian children suffer not only from iodine deficiency; according to the latest research, conducted by Ukrainian Institute of Social Studies, children’s diet includes not enough fruit, vegetables, meat and fish.
“The seriousness of the problem is that only 22 percent of Ukrainian school students eat vegetables in sufficient quantities, 17 percent – fruit, only third of them consume the required quantities of meat and dairy products, and only 13 percent of children eat enough fish,” noticed Oleh Shvets, main freelance dietician at the Ukraine’s Ministry of Health.
According to doctors, unbalanced nutrition (when children do not eat enough of the mentioned required products and, instead, have more sweets and sugary drinks than allowed) leads to serious disturbances in health. The consequences will be felt in adulthood in form of noninfectious diseases, diabetes, and cancer.
“Serious changes should be made in the nutrition of children, because, according to WHO, two thirds of premature deaths and one third of all diseases in adulthood are caused by poor nutrition and unhealthy lifestyles in childhood and adolescence,” said Shvets. National action plans for healthy eating, targeted regional programs, and information campaigns – all of this, according to experts, must be done already today to avoid losing whole generations.
