Children get early taste of healthy eating

Families in Leeds were encouraged to ditch the junk food and get fit at the awareness event at Trinity Leeds on Saturday.

The aim was to help families across the city make simple changes with a “smart swapathon”.

Visitors were taught how to cook healthy food and sign up to the scheme, which sees families swap to a healthy school meal, ditch takeaways and start cooking from scratch.

Health chiefs in Leeds are supporting the national campaign Smart Swaps, which encourages people to cut sugar and saturated fats from their snacks, drinks and meals.

Families, organisations and schools are being encouraged to swap fizzy drinks for sugar-free juice, milk or water; enjoy a healthy breakfast; swap to school meals; swap takeaways and ready meals to cooking from scratch and find new ways to become active.

Speaking about the campaign last week, CounLisa Mulherin, chairman of the Leeds Health and Wellbeing board, said: “January always makes us want to eat healthily and Change4Life’s Smart Swaps campaign makes it easy to make a change to our lifestyles and feel better for it.

“Leeds has been making some real progress on health and wellbeing.

“We’re determined to do more to reduce the life expectancy gap between communities.

“But we know that we face a challenge in coming years as we deal with the impact of financial constraints.

“As well as Smart Swaps, our teams are offering help with stopping smoking, sexual health issues, cancer, obesity and alcohol, along with a wide range of other issues.”

Organisations can also sign up to the totalizer challenge, which uses a counter system to measure the swaps made.

Visit www.leedsletschange.co.uk/smartswaps for details.