While it’s never too late to turn around your habits, it’s always easier to have healthy habits from the start. Nowhere is this as important and as evident as with nutrition. Your food affects your health, fitness, appearance, and brain power. By eating junk food, you’re shortening your lifespan, deteriorating your quality of life, and, overall, causing several problems.
By teaching young kids about healthy eating habits, you can ensure they adopt and grow into them. This should start at home, but sadly, this isn’t always true. So, it’s the job of educators to step up and help their students develop positive eating habits. Here’s how these educators can help.
1. Make it an interactive experience
You can teach kids about healthy snacks, but why don’t you teach them how to make them? As they say, if you give a person how to fish, you’ve fed him for a day, but if you teach them how to fish, you’ve fed them for life.
By providing them with practical experience and knowledge through interactive learning, you show them how easy it is to make healthy snacks.
You can also show them healthier alternatives to preparing food. You don’t have to insist or even insinuate that they should eat raw food, but you could tell them the advantages of boiling and oven-baking over pan-frying or deep-frying, etc.
This can easily be done even via online education.
2. Gamify the experience
You need to make sure that kids learn through play because that’s the best way. In other words, you need to make a gamified curriculum since this will let kids learn by example.
For instance, making them learn the list of all the protein-rich foods is quite inefficient compared to asking them to sort foods by the main macronutrient and awarding them a point for each correct answer. Splitting them into competing teams will make the class more interactive and give them a necessary incentive.
Just make sure that you turn this game into an inclusive experience. You don’t want kids to become too competitive and get discouraged if they fail to get first place. Also, a great reward is an amazing opportunity to improve their intrinsic motivation.
3. Take them outside
You don’t have to limit this activity to the kitchen. By introducing gardening to your curriculum, you can show them how to produce food more easily. So-called taco gardens or pizza gardens are a great way to get there.
Start a garden that can grow all you need to make a pizza. Then, you make an organic, healthy pizza and treat everyone in the classroom.
They need to understand the whole process and understand that it’s not pizza or tacos that are inherently unhealthy. It’s bad ingredients that make them worse, as well as eating them without moderation. It’s the latter that will make the biggest difference.
The most compelling argument you can make is to show them (side-by-side) the difference between a home-grown vegetable and one bought in-store. You can even organize a tasting.
Most importantly, you’ll take them outside, which they might find more stimulating as a learning environment.
4. Go to the store
Another fun idea for a field exercise is to take them to the grocery store and teach them what they should focus on while shopping. Everything should be written on the declaration, but labels can be misleading, and you should teach them how to see through it. The best way to show them this could be to organize a screening of a movie like Super Size Me 2.
The key is taking a small group of students to a store and teaching them how to distinguish processed foods from whole foods. You can even direct them to where they’re more likely to find these whole foods.
As we’ve mentioned in the previous section, it’s usually not the food that’s good or bad. It’s the preparation process and the ingredients that will make a problem.
You have so many ideas out there for high-protein, low-calorie pizza. You even have pizzas that are made with cauliflower dough.
5. Encourage them to keep a food journal
While counting calories may be too obsessive for a young kid, keeping track of your meals is incredibly important. Skipped meals can turn into horrible habits. This is something you want to discourage.
Also, if they ever decide to be serious about professional sports, a caloric deficit can be a severe problem. They’ll need protein for muscle building, carbohydrates and fat for energy, etc. Teaching them how to plan their meals is one of the best things you can do to support this career.
This is also a great opportunity to teach them how proper eating habits and healthy physical activity go hand in hand. Show them how good nutrition fuels their body; this will be a lesson they’ll never forget.
6. Use positive peer pressure
One of the great ways to promote healthy eating in children is to encourage students to keep each other accountable. You don’t want to encourage tattletales, but you do want to encourage your students to rely on their peers more than on their educators.
Also, by grouping students, encouraging them to talk on these topics, and even suggesting that they should swap recipes, etc., you can use positive peer pressure to make them more susceptible to these ideas and nutrition habits.
This idea can be tied to the previous one. After all, if they keep a snack journal, they’re more likely to discuss this topic with their peers. It’s that easy.
Conclusion
Nutrition is one of the most important topics to discuss with kids. Instilling strong principles regarding proper nutrition and a healthy lifestyle in their formative years will be much easier. Later in life, this will help them maintain healthier body weight, remain much healthier, become more successful at sports and fitness, and even raise their confidence. It all starts with this simple (yet basic) talking point that conventional education, sadly, chooses to skip.
