The 2025 Child Nutrition Report – ‘Feeding Profit: How food environments are failing children’ – has revealed the role that unhealthy food is contributing to a global surge in obesity among children and adolescents.
Globally, Unicef found that there are 188 million teenagers and school-age children with obesity, which equates to one in 10.
Meanwhile, one in five children and adolescents aged five to 19 are now overweight, while the number of overweight young people within this age range has doubled from 194 million to 391 million since 2000.
The report described how school-aged children and adolescents are being exposed to a “constant supply of cheap and aggressively marketed” ultra-processed foods (UPFs) and sugary drinks. On top of this, there has been a failure to make nutritious options readily available and affordable.
Unicef also explored how a lack of effective legislation and regulation has left government around the world unable to safeguard children and adolescents from existing “harmful food environments”.
“Our analysis finds that unhealthy foods and beverages, including ultra-processed foods and beverages, are widely available, inexpensive and aggressively marketed in the places where children live, learn and play,” the report said.
“The unethical business practices of the ultra-processed food and beverage industry undermine efforts to put legal measures and policies in place to protect children from unhealthy food environments. However, with determined action, governments can adopt comprehensive, mandatory measures to reshape food environments and uphold children’s right to food and nutrition.”
To address the issues highlighted, the report presented eight recommendations for transforming children’s food environments. These included a code of marketing for breast-milk substitutes, mandatory measures to improve school environments, policies to improve nutritious food availability and affordability and safeguards to protect public policy processes from interference by the ultra-processed food industry.
“Governments bear the primary responsibility for protecting children’s right to food and nutrition; however, achieving swift, impactful change towards healthier food environments demands unified action from multiple stakeholders,” report concluded.
Reacting to the report, Ali Morpeth, co-founder of the Planeatry Alliance, told Food Manufacture: “The UNICEF report underlines what we see every day: children’s diets are being shaped by food environments that make unhealthy options cheap, available and aggressively marketed, while healthier foods remain out of reach for too many families. Obesity is a predictable response to food environments around where children live, play and go to school.
“If we want children to thrive, we have to flip the system. That means building environments where nutritious food is the default — affordable, accessible, and desirable, so that the easy choice is also the healthy one. Designing food environments that serve children’s health is one of the most powerful ways to secure resilient markets and healthier futures."
