UNICEF Report: United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), Feeding Profit. How food environments are failing children. Child Nutrition Report 2025, UNICEF, New York, September 2025.
The 2025 Child Nutrition Report – ‘Feeding Profit: How food environments are failing children’ – reveals how unhealthy food environments are contributing to the worldwide surge in overweight and obesity in children and adolescents.
The report presents the latest data on the status, trends and inequities in overweight and obesity among children and adolescents worldwide. It describes how food environments expose children and adolescents to a constant supply of cheap and aggressively marketed ultra-processed foods and sugary drinks, while failing to make nutritious options available and affordable. It also explains how the lack of effective policies leaves countries unprepared to safeguard children and adolescents from these harmful food environments.
Drawing from recent examples of countries that have made extraordinary progress, the report presents eight recommendations to transform children’s food environments:
- Implement the International Code of Marketing of Breast-milk Substitutes and subsequent World Health Assembly resolutions to protect and promote breastfeeding and appropriate complementary feeding.
- Implement comprehensive, mandatory measures to transform food environments (school food environments, food marketing restrictions, food labelling, taxes on unhealthy foods and beverages and food reformulation).
- Implement comprehensive policies to improve the availability and affordability of locally produced nutritious foods for children and adolescents.
- Establish robust safeguards to protect public policy processes from interference by the ultra-processed food industry.
- Implement social and behavior change initiatives that empower families and communities to claim their right to a healthy food environment.
- Strengthen social protection programs to address income poverty and increase children’s access to nutritious and healthy diets.
- Engage young people in public policymaking on food justice by fostering youth-led advocacy.
- Strengthen global and national data and surveillance systems to monitor food environments, diets, and overweight among children and adolescents.
Full report available for download in multiple languages:
Click here
Publication date: September 2025
