Nutrition

Resources For Teachers

March is National Nutrition Month--check out these interdisciplinary activity ideas and online resources you can use to explore good nutrition!

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Teaching Ideas

Food Pyramid Diary

If "you are what you eat," where does that leave your students? Ask them to check up on their nutritional habits by keeping a "food diary" for three days--noting everything they eat or drink (including gum). Students should be certain to include the number or approximate size of meal servings.

After three days, students should tabulate their diary entries. How many servings of breads? Dairy? Fruits and vegetables?

Ask students to take their information and draw a nutrition pyramid--one for each of the three days in their diary. In it, they should make the layers of the pyramid correspond to the types of foods they ate that day (those with the most servings form the base, and the fewest servings, the tip).

Compare students' food pyramids to the real food pyramid, which may be accessed online at the USDA Web site.

Ask students to answer the following questions:

• Were you short in any areas? Day 1, Day 2, Day 3? If so which ones and by how much?
• Were you over the minimum recommended amounts in any areas? Day 1, 2, 3? If so, in which ones and by how much?
• Is there anything you noticed that seemed to be a pattern for those three pyramids?
• In which areas were you deficient for all 3 days?
• What changes should you be making in your diet on a daily basis?

More advanced students might investigate the following questions:

• What are the total calories and the calories from fat for each day in your 3 day diet?
• For each day, are you within the recommended limit of calories from fat of 30%?
• How did you figure that?

As a follow up, students may want to learn more by visiting the Frontline: Fat Web site.

Body Image: A Look In The Mirror

Your students may have heard of celebrities who have battled eating disorders--among them, Courtney Thorne-Smith, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Tori Amos, Paula Abdul, Princess Diana, and Lucy Lawless. Men are also susceptible to eating disorders like anorexia and bulemia, particularly athletes who are trying to cut weight.

It's important that your students know that eating disorders are quite common, particularly among adolescents. How common? And what causes eating disorders?

Advertisers and the entertainment industry have come under fire from health care professionals who believe ads, movies, and TV shows promote unrealistic and unhealthy ideas about body image. What do your students think about this?

Help students create an anonymous survey to determine one or more of the following:

• How many students in your community have had eating disorders?
• How do students perceive their own bodies?
• What is the "ideal weight"?
• Which celebrities do they think look healthiest and/or most attractive?

Results from the survey may be tabulated and presented in a report to the school newspaper, community health organizations, or other interested parties. Your students may also be interested in investigating what kind of statistics the federal government keeps on adolescents and eating disorders; start at the Centers for Disease Control Web site. For more information about eating disorders, check out NOVA: Dying To Be Thin.

PBS Online Resources: Sites to See

Older Students:

Body and Soul: Mindful Eating

http://www.pbs.org/bodyandsoul/208/ This site focuses on our relationship to food and abuse of it (overeating, bingeing, etc.)

Class in America: You Are What You Eat

http://www.pbs.org/classinamerica/resources/index.html
Explore how social class affects nutritional requirements and diet.

Frontline: Fat

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/fat/
Find out how modern life, biology and genetics influence our weight. Get information about obesity, surgical remedies for obesity, and hear what the experts have to say about weight loss and gain.

NOVA: Dying To Be Thin

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/thin/
A rich, recent site dealing with adolescents and eating disorders. (*Note: The entire program is available for viewing online, and there is a special online game called "Body Needs" that would be great to work in for upper elementary and middle school students--it's at http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/thin/needs.html)

NOVA: Shackleton's Antarctic Odyssey: Meal of Endurance

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/shackleton/classroom/w4meal.html
Analyze caloric and nutritional value of foods eaten by Antarctic explorers, and compare their diet to your own.

Regina's Vegetarian Table

http://www.reginasvegetariantable.com/
How does our diet help us ward off illness? What are the special dietary needs of vegetarians? Where can I find recipes for really good vegetarian meals?

A Science Odyssey

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aso/databank/medhealth.html
Read about 20th century advances in health and medicine, including nutrition-related issues like Pellagra and Diabetes.

Stealing Time: The New Science of Aging

http://www.pbs.org/stealingtime/
What do restricted calorie diets and nutrition have to do with a longer life span?

Scientific American Frontiers:

About All You Can Eat

http://www.pbs.org/saf/transcripts/transcript502.htm and http://www.pbs.org/safarchive/4_class/45_pguides/pguide_502/4552_idx.html
Learn about counting calories, food at Plimoth Plantation in colonial times, an obesity study in Mexico, how foods are processed or treated to make them more digestible, meet mushroom connoisseurs, and learn about pet food nutrition.

Younger Students:

Food For The Ancestors

http://www.pbs.org/foodancestors/midplan.html
Compare Mexican food to American food, and relate the USDA's Food Pyramid to indigenous Mexican foods.

PBS Mathline: Health: Comparing Calories

http://www.pbs.org/teachersource/mathline/concepts/health/activity2.shtm
Create box and whisker plots comparing calorie information from different fast food chains.

Winter Games Cyberschool: Extreme Nutrition

http://pbscyberschool.pbs.org/teach/lesson61_1.html
Students develop a one-week menu for a competitive snowboarder.

What's Cookin'

http://pbscyberschool.pbs.org/teach/lesson72_1.html
Students research the metabolic requirements of athletes and publish an online cookbook.