The journal article Cooking with kids positively affects fourth graders’ vegetable preferences and attitudes and self-efficacy for food and cooking (2013), by Cunningham-Sabo and Lohse, was a research study done on “Cooking with Kids” or CWK. CWK is an existing experimental food education program aimed at Kinder through 6th grade children in low-income, mostly Hispanic schools in a Southwestern US city (Cuningham-Sabo & Lohse, 2013). This study was intended to evaluate the effect on mostly non-Hispanic white children, and to determine if CWK had a greater effect with children who had not participated in CWK in the past. The hypothesis, based on results from the existing CWK program, was that all children irrespective of their background would benefit their cooking attitudes and self-efficacy for food and cooking from a program that exposes them to vegetable and fruit preparation as a part of their regular curriculum.
The participants in this study where 257 students mostly non-Hispanic white fourth graders, with an almost even split of boys and girls. The exclusion criteria were all non-fourth graders and non-white participants since CWK is already focused on that particular demographic and this new study was aimed at a different sample. The study design included participants from a pool of 12 schools in northern Colorado who indicated interest to an invitation from the district wellness coordinator (Cuningham-Sabo & Lohse, 2013). From those 12 schools, four elementary schools with similar enrollments and socio-economic characteristics were selected and randomly assigned to two schools for intervention, or two schools for comparison (Cuningham-Sabo & Lohse, 2013). The intervention group involved CWK and included cooking and tastin...
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..., 2013). The authors state that this study presents sufficient evidence showing the important effects of CWK and subsequently supports the integration of nutrition classes within elementary school academia. The Institute of Medicine of the National Academies are currently discussing the development of US nutrition education academic standards and will likely include promotion of CWK style education into the school curriculum (Cuningham-Sabo & Lohse, 2013). Finally, the authors cite that additional studies of health and education of these programs need to be completed and documented to further show their effects and added value (Cuningham-Sabo & Lohse, 2013).
Works Cited
Cuningham-Sabo, L., & Lohse, B. (2013). Cooking with Lids Positively Affects Fourth Graders' Vegetable Preferences and Attitudes and Self-Efficacy for Food and Cooking. Childhood Obesity, 549-556.
If schools were to encourage healthy eating by serving a more variety of foods students would learn to like healthy eating. In the study done by Julianna Cecere she asked students through the social media app Twitter to tweet her their opinions on their school lunches and most of them were not in favor of them. One Student tweeted: “@KQEDedspace To make school lunches more appealing we need flavorful yet healthy foods. Things that are home grown, not canned. #DoNowLunch” (Cecere, 2014) Students want to have better eating habits and it 's best to teach them at a young age so they grown up to live a healthy lifestyle and live longer but not when the food is canned and not
Unger, Jennifer B. et al. 2004. “Acculturation, physical activity, and fast-food consumption among asian-american and hispanic adolescents.” Journal of Community Health 29:467-481.
Childhood obesity in particular poses a large problem because it increases the likelihood of these children developing diabetes and heart disease, staying obese into adulthood, and therefore being more prone to chronic diseases. According to Healthy People 2020, 81.8% of adolescents do not reach the optimal amount of physical activity recommended for them. This is one of the factors that has led to 1 in 6, or 16.2%, of children and adolescents being obese (Nutrition). A research conducted on children and adolescents from 1999-2010 showed that 21.2% of Hispanic American children and adolescents were obese compared to 14.0% of non-Hispanic white children and adolescents (Ogden). In a 2004 study researchers examined the risk factors for obesity in Hispanic American 5 and 6 year olds. They took height and weight calculations of 230 kindergarteners from two public schools and interviewed and measured several mothers. They defined overweight as height for weight measurement at or above the 95 percentile for other children their age and a BMI of 25-29.9 as overweight for mothers and 30 or above as obese (Ariza). The growing prevalence of overweight children makes it clear that the problem is rooted in environment not just genetics. The risk factors focused on in this study were demographics, acculturation, physical activity, infant/toddler feeding practices, current eating habits, the mother’s attitude toward and belief about obesity and psychosocial family elements (Ariza). The researchers proposed the more acculturated to Western ideas the family was, the more overweight the children. Demographics asked about where mother and child were born and the education level and marital status of the mother. Physical activity asked how much time was spent participating in physical activity and watching TV. Infant/toddler feeding practices focused on the length of time breast-feeding and introduction
Townsend, Nick, Simon Murphy, and Laurence Moore. "The More Schools Do To Promote Healthy Eating, The Healthier The Dietary Choices By Students." Journal Of Epidemiology & Community Health 65.10 (2011): 889-895. Academic Search Complete. Web. 14 Feb. 2014.
When you send your children off to school, you might worry about bullying or about their academic performance, but you generally don’t consider their lunch-time meal to be a potential problem. Now imagine, for a moment, your son or daughter is given the option between a juicy cheeseburger with greasy French fries and a healthier chicken salad. It’s a no-brainer what choice they will make. Now, stop imagining because you don’t have to. Instances like this are a reality everyday in many school cafeterias. In 2005, John Esterbrook, a writer for CBS News, reported on a government survey showing that junk foods are in competition with healthy counterparts in nine out of ten schools (par. 1). Today, although four years later, little improvement has been made to ensure students in schools are eating healthy.
Since 1916, the United States Department of Agriculture (the government agency responsible for all U.S. policy regarding agriculture, food, and farming) has revised their recommendations several times. Unfortunately, money talks and the USDA’s recommendations are based on outdated science and are influenced by people with business interest. Even so, its recommendations are considered almost “holy” by physicians, nutritionists, and dieters, but in reality, they are the root cause of the problem. A single visit to our local public school cafeteria and it will become clear that they do not have the best interests of the children at heart. What they are feeding our innocent children is preposterous. Doctors, the people we trust and expect to be “the experts”, do not know much about the subject of nutrition. A vast majority of medical schools in the U.S. require just 25-30 hours or less of nutrition training, and some do not require at all. So doctors must rely on the ...
Sandra Steingraber wrote the essay titled, “My Children: The Food Experiment” about her experience as a mother of two children who have never been exposed to any type of advertisements or propaganda regarding commercialized food products. Steingraber and her family moved to a cabin in the woods near Ithaca, New York and when the family arrived at their new home the discovered their television had been stolen. They decided not to replace the television, which did not seem like a conscious decision to not expose their children to advertisement as much as it related to it not being a central part of their current life or lack of finances to replace it. Not replacing the television provided a context clue that this experiment was not planned,
Unfortunately, in today’s society, school administrators focus heavily on standardized test scores and school rankings thus adding more pressure on students and teachers. This being said, schools have begun to focus on providing healthy foods because they help increase a person’s cognitive and critical thinking ability. It is seen that nutrition plays a great role in students’ performance on exams and physical activity due to the correlation between school provided meals and low student
Many cafeteria workers and staff members in 49 states have said many students do not want the governments new school lunches. Almost 7 out of 17 schools with have been seen with students throwing away some or all their fruits or vegetables, even the cafeteria workers are suffering under these new standards. About 60.3 percent of school districts want flexibility to be given to all schools to improve their ability to provide and give good nutrition without harm to any instructions and school district operations. Schools should know by now what is good for students and what is not, but they should not go overboard with the wheat and whole grain items. Another example that shows that schools should be responsible for providing a nutritious lunch is knowing that there are a variety of ways to make healthy foods taste good for school students. Healthy tasty food that will risk diabetes and obesity .One of the biggest reasons people do not eat healthy foods is because they feel it as if it will not taste good. The problem is, if your health food does not taste good, you are eating the wrong health food. Just because something is good for you does not mean it has to taste nasty, boring, or completely gross. There are plenty of ideas out there for eating healthy without making sacrifices on taste. “It is silly that people are worried about kids throwing things out. There are many ways to make
In relation to the modern world of food, in terms of ways in which people or families have grown accustomed to this in turn affects the ways in which students and teenagers eat. In Jonathan Safran Foer’s article, “The American Table and The Global Table,” he expresses that people consume so mindlessly and ignorantly that as a nation, we are giving the government opportunities to manipulate the ways in which food is perceived. Foer argues that “today, to eat like everyone else is to add another straw to the camel’s back” (Foer 971). This is significant in that it highlights the role that consumers play in the food industry. Put bluntly, the more mindless demands that are made, the worse the situation becomes. Students and adolescents, ambitious and goal-driven, often claim that it is important to stop such unawareness, but the irony lies in the fact that we might be just as unaware. The more we demand, the more the government complies and essentially, people are “sending checks to the absolute worst abusers” (Foer 968). As administrators in the cafeteria, where finances are limited, and time is constrained on a daily basis, I believe it is so important that your team continues to implement quick, but sustainable food choices. In a sense, it is purely the matter of the ways of how easily students can be conditioned into choosing the right foods and by continuing to maintain these healthy options students will be able to avoid the growing epidemic, obesity. Michael Pollan claims that “daily, our eating turns nature into culture, transforming the body of the world into our bodies and minds,” and what can be drawn from this is that people are affected by habits and if students are habitually surrounded by these healthier food choices, the result will be most significant and beneficial in the end (Pollan 10). While I am not saying that by implementing a
Tanaka, N., & Miyoshi, M. (2012). School lunch program for health promotion among children in Japan. Asia Pacific Journal of Clinical Nutrition, 21(1), 155–158.
Gross, S. and Cinelli, B. (2004). Coordinated school health program and Dietetics professionals: Partners in promoting healthful eating. Journal of the American Dietetic Association, 793-798.
¨Life itself is the proper binge¨ was a motto and life style that famous chef Julia Child lived by. Going through school, those she´s taught, the cultures she has introduced and explored, and even becoming famous have all been influenced by this saying. Child was, and still is, considered among the greats in modern cooking.
The seventh grade health curriculum at Wayne Central teaches that foods are either gold, silver, or bronze; representing healthy, okay, and unhealthy retrospectively. This information is accompanied by instruction to not eat bronze foods and eat silver foods sparingly. Education that gives strict, polarized, definitions of food can cause adolescents to become pre-occupied with what they eat and dissatisfied with themselves. Welch, McMahon, and Wright conducted a study on the ways nutrition and health have become increasingly influential to children’s everyday behaviors and conceptualizations of food. The study included an interview of 32 primary students in which the children were asked, “What does health mean to you?” Students’ answers indicated extensive consideration was given to classifying foods as ‘good’, ‘bad’, ‘healthy’ and ‘unhealthy’. All students, except one who answered “protein”, defined “healthy” or “good” foods as fruits and vegetables, well omitting mention of other essential food groups. Sugar, fat, and “junk” food such as chips, cookies, and cake were among answers describing ‘bad’ or ‘unhealthy’ foods. “In the interviews the consumption of the ‘wrong’… food was always regarded as dangerous and transgressive, signifying ‘bad’ or ‘sinful’ practices…. The consistency and intensity of this message shapes the thoughts of individuals in ways that can conjure up feelings of shame and disgust” (Welch et
...arable interaction between nutrition and exercise, and I appreciate a program that challenges students to see how different areas of health intersect and connect. In addition to this solid foundation of public health knowledge, George Washington’s one-on-one mentorship opportunities and customizable field and research experiences allows students to develop the skills necessary to succeed in their specific area of interest. The university’s location also provides access to a wide range of organizations, agencies, and policymakers, and the chance to work with these groups would give me unparalleled insight into public health policy. George Washington’s public health program strives to fully prepare students for successful careers in public health, and I hope to use the knowledge and experience from the program to reduce the impact of eating disorders on public health.