Adolescent overweight and obesity are becoming more prevalent the last decades. The decrease in physical exercise, in combination with an increase in meals eaten outside home and school, induce children to formulate unhealthy eating habits with severe effects on their development and health. School education has a significant role in formulating healthy food choices and students need to be encouraged to improve their diet, by consuming safe and healthy meals. To promote healthy meals and healthy eating habits and food choice, more and more countries nowadays try to develop policy measures and recommendations to encourage the consumption of quality and healthy food, especially among students and adolescents. The aim of this paper is to examine the attitudes and the behavior of students in elementary school, concerning the daily nutrition and food choice during the school day. Concerning that the ministry of education formulated a nutrition policy at schools, trying to promote more healthy foods during the breaks, it is important to test the effect of this measure on students’ nutrition.

The study is based on data collected from 360 students 9-12 years old in four elementary schools in Northern Greece. The study focuses on the factors which affect children’s eating habits during the school day. Such factors are family, parents/ guardians, school environment including teachers and cantinas and other sociological and psychological factors. Factor analysis was applied to derive the main determinants of students’ attitudes towards food choices. T-test and ANOVA techniques attempted to examine potential differences among students’ attitudes, according to school environment, gender, age, family status and money spend for meals outside home.

Findings highlight that adolescents’ increased consumption of unhealthy food is related to the availability of these products in schools. On the other hand even higher consumption of these foods is noticed on girls rather than boys. However, differences in gender are also noticed on the lunch or the lunch money that children take from home and on the parental control of their nutrition. Finally, students’ preferences about diet depend on the mood, the familiarity, the taste and the trendness. However, it seems that the value/price, the ingredients of these foods and whether it is healthy or not, does not concern adolescents.