atpase inhibitor br Discussion Child health research has

Discussion Child health research has largely been informed by traditional models of child development in which children progress through predictable and universal stages of development (McIntosh et al., 2013, p. 4). Within this framing, didactic teaching of knowable facts is prioritised and children characterised as sponges waiting to be filled with information (Evans et al., 2011; St Leger, 2001). Although a small, yet growing body of research focuses on exploring children\'s own health-relevant understandings and practices (for example, Christensen (2004), Mayall (1998), McIntosh et al., (2013) andFairbrother etal. (2012, 2016)), the ways in which children interact with health messages and how these messages do (or do not) become meaningful for children in their everyday lives, represents a significant gap in the literature (Borzekowski, 2009). The notion of health literacy, how people access, understand and use health information (Nutbeam, 2000) can open up for critical analysis the ways in which children make meaning in relation to health messages. In this paper, honing in on how children access and understand health information (the first two dimensions of Nutbeam\'s, (2000)) conceptualisation of health literacy) has provided a productive, if not entirely unproblematic, analytical framework for understanding how children make meaning with respect to the relationship between food and health. Exploring how children access health information has helped to provide a picture of the myriad sources with which children interact. In sharp atpase inhibitor to traditional conceptions of health promotion, which depict health promotion as the predominant source of health information (St Leger, 2001; Wallerstein, 1988), children\'s accounts attest to the wide variety of different and sometimes competing food-related information resources, which children access. As well as the school and the home, well-recognised resources for children\'s learning, children\'s accounts show that they access information in the wider social context, such as advertising aimed at adult audiences and contemporary media stories (Buckingham, 2000, 2013). Further and significantly, while their discussions regarding the healthiness of fruit and vegetables certainly show that children can and do appreciate, remember and reiterate the information given to them, they also demonstrate inconsistencies, gaps and simplifications in the information they access. Consequently, children have to work hard to piece together, prioritise or reject fragments of information in order to create broader, more comprehensive frameworks of understanding that work for them in their everyday lives. Exploring how children form understandings, the second stage in Nutbeam\'s (2000) health literacy process, has facilitated the creation of a nuanced, complex picture of meaning making engaged in by children. Nutbeam\'s (2000) dimensions of critical and interactive literacy have particular resonance for the data explored. The way in which children mobilised their own embodied experiences to check and sometimes problematise the health information with which they interacted represents a pertinent example of critical literacy: \'the ability to assess the quality and relevance of information and advice to one’s own situation\' (Harris et al., 2015, p. 3). Their critique of dominant messages (like, for example, chocolate is bad) when their own bodies manifest that this is not always the case provides compelling evidence of how children engage in health literacy as a way of assessing the meaningfulness of health information for their everyday lives (Wallerstein, 1988). In this way, the data illustrate how children take health information and apply it to their specific, individual circumstances (Ishikawa et al., 2008), contextualising it in relation to their own health (Rubinelli, Schulz & Nakamoto, 2009; Wallerstein, 1988). Chinn (2011) highlights the relevance of such critical thinking skills in what she describes as an \'age of information overload\' where individuals are forced to navigate through a wealth of often inconsistent and competing information and develop their own ideas. As Chinn (2011) suggests, such tactics resemble Lupton\'s (1997) description of the \'ideal health consumer\' in contemporary society: a consumer who is \'sceptical of expert opinions, reflexive, autonomous, evaluating information in terms of personal benefit […]\' (Chinn, 2011, p. 62). Such a characterisation is clearly in sharp contrast to dominant conceptualisations of children as empty vessels or neutral sites (Wallerstein, 1988, p. 381). The health promotion picture is thus much more complicated than the simple transmission of knowledge and values from adults to children (St Leger, 2001).