An increasing number of reports have targeted school-based nutrition education as a major challenge for promoting healthy eating patterns among the Australian population. Some have called for programs to go beyond considering the health of the individual, and to adopt approaches which challenge the structural determinants of health. There has been a concomitant growing trend to encourage empowerment-based approaches to health education. However, theorists have not addressed how empowerment approaches might be established and made workable at a classroom level. A review of the literature identified that there was no comprehensive theoretical framework for an empowerment approach to school-based nutrition education. This study, in collaboration with the National Nutrition Education in Schools project, has developed and refined a theoretical framework which synthesises constructs related to developmental, social and cognitive psychology with constructs related to effective learning and teaching in order to formulate an action-oriented, empowerment approach to nutrition education. The study includes an evaluation of programs based on the theoretical framework when trialled with 12-14 year-olds from varying socio-economic backgrounds in three Queensland high schools. These three schools were matched to control schools which implemented their regular food and nutrition programs. Qualitative and quantitative data were collected in a design which synthesised naturalistic and experimental inquiries. The qualitative data provided an understanding of the internal dynamics of the programs: how the programs were organised; the strengths and weaknesses of the programs; the features that made the programs efficacious; and what students and teachers experienced and gained from the program. The data provided evidence of the approach being successful from both students' and teachers' perspectives. Data were used to determine students' understanding of the empowerment process, their competence in the steps of an empowerment process, and their attempts and success in bringing about change to food-related behaviours. The quantitative data related to the empowerment process were analysed by repeated measures analysis of co-variance (ANCOVA), with socio-economic status as the main effect and gender as the co-variate. The effect of the intervention on students' attempts to change their diet, and the success of such, were analysed using the Mann Whitney U-test. Prior to implementation, there was no significant difference in any scores of students in the intervention regime compared to the control regime. With respect to understanding the empowerment process, competence in the steps of the empowerment process, and the combined score, there was a significant interaction of time and intervention, with the students who participated in the program scoring significantly higher than control students (P=0.008; P=0.0001; and P=0.0001 respectively). There was no significant interaction between time, intervention and socio-economic status for any of the three score types (P=0.10; P=0.44; and P=0.31 respectively). There was significant interaction between time and gender for the combined score (P=0.04), with females scoring higher than males. Significantly more students in the intervention regime attempted to change their diet, and had a greater number of successful changes, as compared to the control regime (P<0.001; P=0.004 respectively). Significantly more females attempted to change their diet, but there was no significant association between gender and the number of successful attempts to change diet. There was no significant effect of socio-economic status on either the number of attempts or the success of such by students. Limitations to the approach include: participating in the approach on one occasion only is unlikely to facilitate continued student control of their food-related behaviours; comprehensive professional development of. teachers was needed; female students responded better to the program than males; and there are few resources to support implementation. It is concluded that the study provides an effective empowerment-based theoretical framework for school-based nutrition education, and evidence of the efficacy of such an approach when implemented in three Queensland high schools. The approach assisted students make health promoting changes to their diets, and was effective regardless of socio-economic class and regardless of gender, although females did respond to the program better than males. The study has provided a foundation for future directions for nutrition education, and concomitant directions with respect to resource development, teacher professional development and pre-service training.