Improving Kids' Nutrition

We all want our kids to eat healthier foods. While chicken nuggets make their eyes light up, it’s fruits and vegetables that will set them on the road to health for a lifetime. But how to do it? A recent study found that children who grow their own food, and prepare and eat it too, make healthier food choices.

Focusing on an innovative program called the School Lunch Initiative, the brainchild of lauded chef Alice Waters, the hypothesis is that if young people are involved in growing, cooking and sharing fresh, healthy food while learning about it in their school curriculum, they will be more likely to develop lifelong healthy eating habits and values consistent with sustainable living. And according to the research, they hit the mark.

In the School Lunch Initiative, participating elementary and middle schools integrated cooking and gardening into their classroom lessons along with improvements in school food and the dining environment in the Berkeley Unified School District in the San Francisco Bay Area. The report states the program was effective in increasing student nutrition knowledge, as well as preference for and consumption of healthy food, especially among elementary school students. Students’ attitudes about the taste and health value of school lunches improved as changes were put in place. It also found that continued School Lunch Initiative exposure into middle school may play an important role in mitigating the negative changes in eating behaviors that typically occur during adolescence. 

The research, commissioned by the Chez Panisse Foundation, produced other inspiring data:

• Preference for fruits and vegetables, especially leafy green vegetables, was clearly greater in schools that coupled improvements in school lunch with classroom learning and cooking and gardening classes. In fact, younger students in these schools increased fruit and vegetable intake by nearly one-and-a-half servings per day.
• Nutritional knowledge increased among fourth and seventh graders who were fed a steady stream of gardening and cooking curriculum.
• Vegetable intake was almost one serving per day greater in the schools with a beefed-up food curriculum, and combined fruit and vegetable consumption increased by 1.5 servings. About 80 percent of this increase came from in-season produce. In comparison, researchers found a nearly one-quarter serving drop in produce intake among other students.

   
Want to get your kid’s school involved? Visit the School Lunch Initiative (schoollunchinitiative.org) or visit The Edible Schoolyard (edibleschoolyard.org), a one-acre garden and kitchen classroom at Martin Luther King, Jr. Middle School in Berkeley, Calif., for more information.—Denise Shoukas

Denise Shoukas is a regular foodspring.com contributor and is the
author of foodspring’s food forager blog.

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