Who says kids won't eat their veggies? Educators can help youth to eat well and live healthy by integrating creative nutrition lessons into school activities.
In the United States, many children face serious health and weight challenges due to a lack of proper nutrition and exercise. U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reports in the toolkitMake a Difference at Your School! that since 1980, the percentage of overweight children ages 6–11 has doubled, and the percentage of overweight adolescents ages 12–19 has tripled. In addition, less than 25 percent of adolescents eat enough fruits and vegetables each day.
Ideally, good eating habits should be formed at home and supported throughout the school day by a nutritional school lunch program and diverse healthy snack options; unfortunately, children are not always encouraged by their parents to make healthy choices. School, therefore, is an appropriate place for an intervention.
Teachers can help youth make smarter decisions about what they eat. By educating young people about how to read nutritional labels and analyze their own diets, we give them the power to make informed choices about what products they put in their bodies.
Making Healthy Choices
In Bethesda, Md., high school teacher Deborah Shauer teaches students about nutrition and cooking in her Food Trends and Technology class. Students learn to analyze their eating habits and become conscious of the choices they make on a daily basis.
To examine their eating practices and uncover deficiencies, students must record everything they consume for two days and then enter this information into a nutrition analysis worksheet. They are then able to see just where their calories are coming from. "A lot of students realize they aren't getting any vitamins at all," says Shauer. Using the results, students must set nutritional and physical goals. Then, Shauer teaches students to cook simple recipes that will help them to meet their goals and fill in dietary black holes.
In the class, students also learn how to decipher food labels and research the nutritional value of items on fast food menus. Shauer notes that many of her students have never received this kind of guidance. "I have to go back to the basics," she says.
In Shauer's experience, even middle school students can understand the value of eating well. During an afterschool program, she taught pre-teens to cook international foods and tasty snacks. Students mastered new techniques with every meeting by following Shauer's example as she demonstrated a skill, such as chopping. They then worked in small groups to make smoothies or prepare a dish such as salsa. "As a cooking teacher, I can get [my students] to eat things that their parents couldn't get them to eat because they're around their peers and they're hungry," says Shauer. "If I say, 'We're eating tofu today' or 'We're making smoothies,' if they're around their friends and one of them likes it, they will try it."
Learning to eat healthy is a gradual process. "Kids don't go into a restaurant and think about the food pyramid," Shauer says. But, with practice, young people can learn to choose healthier alternatives and experiment with different types of food rather than sticking to the same old hamburger-and-fries routine. Shauer impresses upon her students that eating well doesn't have to be a chore. She tells them, "You can be healthy and cook for yourself and it doesn't have to take a long time."
Getting Creative as a Team
Even without available cooking equipment, schools have many options for exciting kids about eating healthy. The U.S. Department of Agriculture's (USDA) Team Nutrition plan encourages schools to teach students about nutrition and exercise using a wide variety of lessons and collaborative activities. On its Team Nutrition Web site (http://teamnutrition.usda.gov), USDA explains that the purpose of the plan is to foster partnerships between schools, parents, and the community "in efforts to continuously improve school meals, and to promote the health and education of 50 million school children in more than 96,000 schools nationwide." USDA offers training grants to help implement the program in schools, but the resources, toolkits, and lesson plans are available through the Team Nutrition site.
In the Team Nutrition Days … and Beyond How-To Kit, USDA recommends educational activities such as starting a class vegetable garden. Whether they situate the garden at the school or in the community, students can decide which vegetables to grow and then learn to plant seeds and tend the crop. They can enjoy harvesting the rewards and creating a meal using the produce from the garden and even work with the food service personnel to serve the produce in a school lunch, if possible. The toolkit provides tips for both classroom and outdoor gardening and outlines lesson plans for different grade levels to help students learn more about nutrition and agriculture.
Team Nutrition Days also provides tips for helping students organize a food festival as a classroom or schoolwide activity. To get started, they can research healthy, traditional foods from other nations to serve at the culinary event. Foods such as hummus, curry chicken, jerk chicken, and rice balls are fairly easy to prepare. Educators can also teach students how to work with community organizations to arrange food donations and other sponsorship opportunities. Also, staff and students can provide cooking demonstrations or create a cookbook that highlights some of the dishes served at the festival.
In Kissimmee, Fla., Gateway High School planned such a Team Nutrition-style food festival upon learning that only 14 percent of students ate the recommended daily servings of fruits and 17 percent ate the recommended daily servings of vegetables. Staff set up tasting stands where students could try an array of fruits and vegetables, and students also participated in games, answering nutrition-related questions. The event made eating healthy fun and provided students with a comfortable way to share new foods with their friends.
Schools face endless challenges while trying to make enough time for instruction during the school day. But as teachers endeavor to educate the whole child, it is important that the whole child be healthy. To fight the increasing rates of obesity and poor health among children, schools can implement lessons in nutrition that can be seen not as a distraction from classroom instruction but as an enhancement.
There are many important benefits to teaching nutritional lessons. Students who are well fed will be not only more likely to concentrate in class but also able to make better decisions in other aspects of their lives. When making critical choices about the types of food they put in their bodies, students must analyze what is "good" for them. This type of analysis and decision making can lead health-conscious young people to also avoid toxic substances such as tobacco, for example.
As the goal of education is to prepare students with the necessary tools for lifelong success in their many endeavors, educators can also help them to live long, healthy lives.
