Saturday, January 18, 2014

Nutrition

Nutrition and malnutrition are important topics to discuss when involving children. Helping them lead healthy lives from the moment they're born leading up to an age where they are capable of making decisions for themselves is vital to their development. There is a lot of controversy today about nutrition and how children are not being taught how to live healthy lifestyles. It only gets more difficult if attempting to change your child's food preference goes from chicken nuggets to broccoli and carrots. Schools have started to change their lunch menus to correlate with healthy eating habits, and it only helps support the movement if those same eating habits are being practiced at home. 

 Nourish Interactive, an online website, promotes itself by offering ways to help parents change their children's eating habits for the better. For example, they listed:
  • Eating breakfast every morning
  • Making a healthy lunch for children to take to school or eat at home
  • Preparing and having readily available healthy snacks for mid-morning and mid-afternoon
  • Planning and cooking the family dinner
These are each very important meals for your child to ensure they grow healthy and build a strong immune system to fight off disease.  Nutrition is the foundation to good health.  It provides the body with the vitamins and minerals needed to grow and maintain a healthy child. (Nourish Interactive).
http://www.nourishinteractive.com/healthy-living/free-nutrition-articles/141-planning-family-healthy-meals
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4 comments:

  1. UnknownJanuary 18, 2014 at 5:54 PM

    Catherine,
    I enjoyed reading about the importance of nutrition. Do you feel children have poor nutrition because as a country as a whole we eat poorly or do you feel it is on a more individual basis. I know when I taught my pre-school room we would have the students help prepare the snacks and talk about why it is healthy and a good choice. We would talk about how it is okay to eat junk food once in awhile but there are other good choices to make. Now, as I teach in the school system, I have a unit on healthy eating and we make lunch or breakfast once a week, making sure all parts of "my plate" are part of the meal.
    Kate

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  2. CBAHJanuary 19, 2014 at 9:40 AM

    I did not include China's children nutrition. In rural countries, breakfast is missed and they have lunch and a dinner. Project Hope has researched in two primary schools in Guangxi and Yunnan Province that the families, teachers and students have much less nutrition knowledge than those in Shanghai. Many of the children are malnourished due to their unhealthy diet habits and the economics of the region. The Chinese Government now has a policy to provide a lunch subsidy to each student in the poor areas of China. Yet some of the school districts do not know how to spend the subsidy to provide the best nutrition for the students. One of our goals in the program is to help the teachers make full use of the subsidy and provide the students a nutritious meal. Before Project HOPE conducted the research and nutrition education program at the school, the children only ate two meals a day without breakfast. At that time, the children complained that they felt very hungry after two lessons in the morning and could hardly concentrate for the next two lessons before lunch. After our education, now the children have some congee with a little meat and an egg for breakfast.

    Reference:

    http://www.projecthope.org/news-blogs/stories/improving-childrens.html#sthash.oRedLZRA.dpuf

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  3. UnknownJanuary 19, 2014 at 5:11 PM

    Hi Catherine,
    I enjoyed reading your post. I make a point of serving well-balanced meals and I also explain to them why certain fruits and vegetables should be eaten and how it helps strengthen and develop their bodies. Last spring we planted a garden and the children loved it.

    ReplyDelete
  4. julianJanuary 19, 2014 at 6:17 PM

    I am so glad that there is a free and reduced lunch program because of the reasons you mentioned! I teach in a title 1 school and honestly if we didn't have the program, many of my students would end up eating chips and candy. Sometimes big government programs are wonderful for our students.."No Child Left Behind...." not so much!!!!

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My Connections to Play

  • "Play gives children a chance to practice what they are learning." By Fred Rogers
  • “The activities that are the easiest, cheapest, and most fun to do – such as singing, playing games, reading, storytelling, and just talking and listening – are also the best for child development.” ~ Jerome Singer (professor, Yale University)
  • “As astronauts and space travelers children puzzle over the future; as dinosaurs and princesses they unearth the past. As weather reporters and restaurant workers they make sense of reality; as monsters and gremlins they make sense of the unreal.” ~ Gretchen Owocki (childhood educator)