Teen Diet and Exercise After the Pandemic: What High Schoolers Did in 2021

Healthy eating and physical activity help teenagers grow and develop, keep a healthy weight, ease anxiety, and lower the risk of conditions such as heart disease and type 2 diabetes. The COVID-19 pandemic changed school meals and sports, and early studies found teens eating breakfast less regularly, snacking more, and moving less. Fall 2021 was the first semester with widespread in-person school since the pandemic began.

CDC used the national Youth Risk Behavior Survey (YRBS) — 17,232 students in grades 9–12 in 2021 and 13,677 in 2019 — to see how high schoolers were eating and moving, and what had changed.

Eating, 2021

• Girls more often skipped fruit (50.5% vs 43.6%), skipped daily breakfast (80.1% vs 69.9%) and drank little water (46.1% vs 42.2%).
• Boys more often drank soda (16.5% vs 12.7%) and sports drinks (13.6% vs 8.4%) daily.
• With some exceptions, these poor habits were less common among Asian students and more common among Black students than among other groups.

The worsening fits with some students turning to less healthy food to cope with stress during the pandemic. Sugary-drink consumption, though unchanged, remained high.

Moving, 2021

Boys were more active than girls on every measure — for example, 31.7% vs 15.7% active every day, and 22.9% vs 8.8% meeting both guidelines. Differences by race and ethnicity followed no clear pattern; meeting both guidelines and playing on a team were more common among White students than Black, Hispanic and multiracial students.

PE and sports matter. Students on at least one sports team were 2.6 times as likely to be active 60+ minutes every day and 3.6 times as likely to meet both guidelines; students in daily PE were 1.8 and 2.1 times as likely. Both opportunities fell after school closures. They also build social and emotional skills — teamwork, communication, goal setting — and school connectedness.

What it means

None of the 11 behaviors improved from 2019, and several got worse, especially for certain groups. With under a quarter getting enough daily activity, many students miss out on activity's benefits for stress, anxiety and depression and for preventing chronic disease. Closures may also have deepened inequities, as students stayed near neighborhoods that differ in safety and places to be active.

What schools can do

• Serve meals meeting U.S. Department of Agriculture nutrition standards, and encourage the National School Lunch and School Breakfast Programs — including Grab and Go and Second Chance breakfasts that don't require coming early.
• Run school gardens with nutrition education, which the Community Preventive Services Task Force recommends to raise vegetable eating.
• Adopt a Comprehensive School Physical Activity Program to offer activity before, during and after school, drawing in families, staff and community partners, supported by CDC's Active People, Healthy Nation initiative.

Health, learning and mental well-being, the report notes, need not compete.

Limits

• The survey asks how often, not how much, so it cannot say whether students met dietary recommendations.
• Family income was not accounted for.
• Differences by sex within racial and ethnic groups were not examined.
• Individual pandemic experiences — remote learning, closures, local COVID-19 burden — were unknown.

Sources

Based on "Dietary and Physical Activity Behaviors in 2021 and Changes from 2019 to 2021 Among High School Students — Youth Risk Behavior Survey, United States, 2021," MMWR Supplements, volume 72, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; a work of the United States government in the public domain. The report's discussion differs from its results on which activity measures were higher among White students; the results are followed here.