- Eating breakfast helps children perform better
- Healthy eating is associated with reduced risk for disease (including heart disease, cancer, stroke, and diabetes)
- Depending on the source, one in five or one in three American children and adolescents are overweight or obese
- About 75% of the $2.8TRILLION in annual health care costs in the US is from chronic diseases that can often be reversed or prevented by a healthy diet and lifestyle (better food choices and exercise)
- An optimal diet is
- low in unhealthy carbs (sugar and refined carbohydrates)
- low in fat (especially saturated fats and trans fats)
- low in red meat (animal protein consumption has been found to trigger the release of cancer-promoting growth hormone IGF -1)
- low in processed foods
- high in healthy carbs (fruits, vegetables, whole grains, legumes, unrefined forms of fish)
- calories count
- As long as you lose weight it doesn't matter what you eat
- Being thin does not necessarily mean being healthy
WHAT THIS MEANS FOR PARENTS AND TEACHERS: we must raise kids' awareness of food and nutition facts, and we must both encourage and model better eating preferences and habits. It also means exercise must be a regular part of our lives and that schools, when cutting gym and recess are hurting the mental and physical health of our kids and we must find alternatives.
As a result of the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act of 2010 public school lunches must now include fruits and vegetables, remain within specific calorie restrictions (high school lunches must be less than 850 calories, middle school lunches no more than 700 calorie, and elementary school lunches no more than 650), and limit fat and sodium intake. So, for example, 2% mile has been replaced with skim milk and French fries have been replaced with baked sweet-potato wedges. Some kids, however, are protesting.
Given this, I was surprised to read (No Appetite for Good-for-You School Lunches-NYTimes, 10/5/12) that outside Pittsburgh, near Milwaukee, in western Kansas, in Parsippany NJ, and across Twitter and Facebook, kids are protesting their healthier school lunches. Students claim that they are still hungry (even though they throw away their fruit and vegetables), the meals are 'tasteless' and students prefer going out or to school vending machines to buy chips and snacks instead of eat the school lunch.
THIS is where education, nutritional awareness, and modeling has to come in.
Below I relay how to BUILD STUDENT EDUCATION AND NUTRITIONAL AWARENESS with:
- kid friendly nutrition web sites
- an awesome nutritional labeling suggestion
- Nutrition Facts for Kids (sponsored by BigOven.com) is an extraordinary site with links for parents; for teachers teaching about nutrition; nutrition information for kids; kid friendly and healthy recipes; and kids' nutrition activities and games.
- KidsHealth has games, movies, experiments, quizzes, activities, and general information. Their topics include how the body works, staying healthy, staying safe, puberty and growing up, recipes and cooking. This site has separate sections for parents, for kids, and for teens.
- Kids Eat Well - from kidseatwell.org and the Illinois NET Program - has games for PreK-Kindergarten, Elementary School, Middle School, High School, Kids Cooking, and Family Fun sections.
- Nutrition Fun For Kids - has free puzzle/activity downloads for kids to read/play, ideas of (seasonal) fun things to do, fun kids 'health' books to read, recipes, and an awesome list of additional links to games and kid-friendly nutrition websites.
- Nourish Interactive - has nutrition games for kids and interactive nutrition tools and tips for parents and health educators. At this website there are games/information for:
- for kids: nutrition and cooking games, Food Label Fun, and Farm to Table games
- a Teacher's Corner with handouts, recipes and cooking tips
- a Parent's Tips and Tools section with important topics to print up and use when talking with kids and their pediatricians; recipes, and meal tips [note that there is one prompt with advertising in the parent's section for Mistrys - the online chemist.]
- a Featured Recipe section
- NutritionExplorations.org has games and 'exploration' prompts dedicated to nutrition that include identifying and classifying foods into the five food groups and identifying the health benefits of each food group.. They have
- Little D's Nutrition Expedition Games designed for lower elementary students
- Arianna's Nutrition Expedition Games designed for upper elementary students
- Other Nutrition Games relating to the benefits of eating healthy meals, especially breakfast and experiment with some winning combinations of foods.
- Kidnetic.com is a colorful, attractive site with prompts for fun kid recipes; learning about their bodies; reading suggestions for food, fun and fitness; games for kids created by kids; a scavenger hunt to be done at home; a fitness challenge; and a "Move Mixer" where kids design a dance and then do it. There is also a fun "quiz" section.
- The Super Crew for Kids has links for Children's Book Corner, Fun Activities, and Nutrition Facts. Activities include coloring pages, puzzles and experiments the family can do together. There are also activities in Spanish.
- SUPER WEBSITE FOR TEACHERS WITH LESSON PLANS INTEGRATING NUTRITION WITH MATH, LANGUAGE ARTS, SCIENCE AND SOCIAL STUDIES: Leafy-Greens Council. The Leafy-Greens.org group links up with their "Cruiferous Crusaders All Star Cancer Fighting Team (all herbivorous dinosaurs) to teach kids/students about the benefits of cruciferous vegetables (vegetables from the leafy green family). Teachers who incorporate their lesson plans into their classrooms can receive free book covers, trading cards and posters (while supplies last).
- Food Champs - for younger kids (ages 2-5 and 6-8) it has games, coloring sheets, recipes and activity pages for kids.
- USDA and their Farm Service Agency has a site with links for coloring pages, fun farm facts, games, and information on conservation and the environment.
- Body and Mind sponsored by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is a wonderfully attractive site with classroom activities and games as well as prompts to play on while learning about diseases, food and nutrition, physical activity, safety, and 'your body.'
Second... A NUTRITIONAL LABELING SUGGESTION:
Nutritional labels help all of us identify foods we should be eating versus those we probably should not. Greater awareness on nutrition along greater ease of identifying foods and food products can make a big difference in consumption.
Mark Bittman in the New York Times Sunday Review (10/14/12) "My Dear Food Label" noted that while nutrition labels already give us useful information they don't tell us whether that food item is at all nutritionally beneficial to us.
Even the simplest information - a red, yellow or green "traffic light," for example - would encourage consumers to make healthier choices...[and]might help counter obesity.Bittman continues noting that such labels "might as well be a skill and crossbones" for manufacturers of 'red light' items which results in their reluctance to carry this through. He notes that in one study (A 2-Pahse Labeling and Choice Architecture Intervention to Improve Healthy Food and Beverage Choices by A.N. Thorndike, L. Sonnenberg, J. Riis, S. Barraclough, and D.E. Levy, found in the American Journal of Public Health, 2011) sales of red-lighted soda fell by 16.5% in three months and the authors concluded that a color-coded labeling intervention improved sales of healthy items.
Over the last few months Bittman has worked with Werner Design Werks and devised a food label that "can tell a story about three key elements of any packaged food" and provide an overall traffic-light-style recommendation or warning. Here is their suggestion: A color coded bar with a 15-point scale determining the product's overall rating for
- Nutrition (including high sugar, trans fats, micronutrients and fiber, etc.)
- Foodiness - "how close the product is to real food"
- Welfare - the treatment of workers, animals, and the earth in the preparation of the product.
Nutrition, Foodness and Welfare would each have a rating bar illustrating how well the particular product holds up on a 0-5 rating scale. It would also color code the 'healthiness' of the product along their 15-point scale. GREEN would recommend "eat" with a score of 11-15 (as seen in the image below); YELLOW would recommend "eat with restraint or consideration" with a score of 6-10; and RED would recommend the food be eaten "rarely or never" with a score of 0-5. The label would also indicate whether the product contained GMO's (Genetically Modified Organisms). Here is what they might look like (sorry I couldn't find a clearer image) along with a link to the complete article "The Proposed Nutrition Label: A Quick Read, Out Front" -The New York Times October 13, 2012):
What do you think? What are some of the things you're doing to help? Please let us know in the comments and thank you for your visit.