Policy and Position Statements

In this position statement we set out the issues facing people living with mental ill-health and make recommendations to ensure that healthcare practitioners working in mental health assess for food insecurity routinely as part of the care they provide.

The BDA believes that as regulated nutrition experts, dietitians can protect and improve public health by working with commercial companies.

The current UK diet does not have the right balance of food recommended for a healthy, sustainable diet. Dietitians have an important role to play in the facilitation of sustainable diets.

Coeliac disease is a condition that warrants the continued availability of staple GF foods on prescription. In England, the BDA would recommend that providers should, as a minimum, adhere to the outcomes of the national consultation that recommended GF bread, flour and flour mixes remain on prescription

Processed foods are commonplace within people’s diets in the UK. Dependent on the composition and degree of processing, processed foods can add to, or reduce the nutritional quality of an individual’s diet.

The BDA believes fortification can play an important role in ensuring a healthy diet.

This policy sets out how the BDA will work with companies who manufacture breastmilk substitutes (BMS), in particular in relation to event sponsorship.

A position statement on complementary feeding (sometimes referred to as weaning)

The BDA believes that nobody should live in food poverty and that UK Government and local authorities must take urgent action to lift people out of food poverty and prevent others from falling into food poverty. This should include enshrining a “Right to Food” in UK law.

This position statement aims to support UK dietitians in clinical practice (in both paediatric and adult settings) to ensure tube-fed individuals receive effective, evidence-based, equitable and quality care.

The BDA Paediatric Specialist Group Position Statement on Soya Formula, updated in 2019 to take account of recent studies including the SACN publication "Feeding in the First Year of Life".

Low-carbohydrate diets (i.e. defined as diets containing between 50g and 130g carbohydrate) can be effective in managing weight, improving glycaemic control and cardiovascular risk in people with Type 2 diabetes in the short term

Dietitians have the expertise both at an individual patient and strategic level to identify, assess, care plan, treat, monitor and review individuals to achieve patient-centred outcomes, and train others to prevent and treat malnutrition.

The BDA supports and welcomes the government’s current childhood obesity strategy, published in August 2016. However, the association strongly believes that additional actions are needed to reduce the unacceptably high prevalence of childhood obesity in the UK.

The BDA strongly supports breastfeeding. We recognise that breastfeeding is the optimum form of nutrition for babies and that breastfeeding protects the health of babies and their mothers.