Most European consumers (80%) think eating a healthy diet is a difficult achievement according to a survey of Consumer Attitudes to Food, Nutrition and Health in the EU. "Helping people feel positive about eating healthily is a major challenge for nutrition educators. It is of vital importance if further dietary improvements are to be achieved."

We all know that good information is one of the major building blocks of good nutrition, good health and good health and lifestyle habits. This is probably truer for children and adolescents than any other population segment. Accessible and relevant information is key to not only building awareness but also for enabling young people to take responsibility for their health and to develop good lifetime nutritional habits. Education of our young people is a major priority and responsibility for EUFIC.

We built the website coolfoodplanet.org oriented toward children and adolescents and complementary to our main site (www.eufic.org). We present nutrition knowledge and content in English, French, German, Spanish (and Italian). Based on this, we have and are continuously evaluating children's and adolescent behaviour as web internauts and their perceptions about nutrition, continuing on from our commissioned study Childrens Views on Food and Nutrition: A Pan European Survey.

We work in partnership, for example, with healthcare and nutrition professionals for quality content provision, relevant to the particular national context and we build contacts with school administrations for dissemination of materials and interaction. Your feedback is a crucial element for the development of this major nutrition portal either via direct e-mail or as part of an emerging informal nutrition on-line virtual community for educators and researchers.

If you wish to introduce your students to the problems of hunger and malnutrition in the world, we recommend the FAO (UN Food and Agriculture Organisation) website Feeding Minds, Fighting Hunger.

Your Feedback We value feedback from teachers and we want to know how you rate us in order to develop relevant and effective nutrition education tools.