Nourish: Food curriculum for upper elementary and middle school teachers

A friend of mine showed me a new food curriculum called Nourish. It looks fantastic. It's geared towards upper elementary and middle schoolers, so I won't be able to use it this fall (I'm teaching kindergarten). But it has some really great ideas for teaching about where food comes from, eating in season, food advertising, and other important food literacy concepts. It also has a bunch of graphics called Food Tools that are perfect for teaching about food systems. Here's one graphic I love and might actually print out to put in my classroom...

The curriculum also has a half-hour video that goes with it. Seems pretty awesome!

Being active in nature makes kids healthier

By now you've probably figured out how much I love infographics. But this one is the best I've seen in a while! It's called Children and Nature: Being active in nature makes kids healthier. As a teacher who works at an environmental education center (for one more week!), the facts in here are great. I printed a copy and laminated it, to put up in my new classroom!

The two most stunning facts:

• Kids spend more than 7 hours a day with various electronic media.
• Children have lost 50% of unstructured outdoor activity over recent decades. 

But fortunately:

• Children living within 2/3 mile of a park with a playground can be 5 times more likely to have a healthy weight.
• Children who spend more time outdoors are less likely to be overweight by 27-41%.

The link to the printable pdf is here.

What's inside a school lunch burger (and a lot of processed veggie burgers)?

Here's an interesting this video from NPR about the unnecessarily long list of ingredients in a school lunch burger. The food scientist in the video argues that children who don't have three balanced meals a day need the extra ingredients in the burger. But I don't think anyone needs thiamine mononitrate, disodium inosinate, and pyridoxine hydrochloride added to their food. Most or all nutrients our bodies need can be found by eating whole, unprocessed foods.

Teaching your kids how to live a healthy life

This post is written by Ashley Smith, a totally inspirational mother of two that has been a friend of mine since middle school! Their family raises chickens, grows their own food, and has a farm share, all things they do to help their children live healthy lives.

I never pictured myself living out in the country, raising farm animals, or growing my own food. I grew up in the suburbs in a bubble, and didn’t picture life differently until I had my own kids. I have two daughters, ages one and two.  It’s important to me that my kids have experiences that help them appreciate what they have and an understanding of how this world works together. 

Don’t get me wrong: we go to the grocery store like anyone else. We treat ourselves to our favorite foods and have lazy days, but my girls know plunking down in front of the TV with a bag of chips is an occasional thing, not our everyday routine. Most of our free time is spent exploring outside, going for walks in the woods, tending to our animals, or simply strolling through the garden. I could argue there’s nothing my oldest daughter loves more than running through rows of corn!

The girls and I participate in a farm share, which is a great experience. Much of our produce from June-October comes from a farm five miles away if it’s not straight out of our garden. Every week we go pick up our box of all kinds of fruits and veggies and I have to hold back eager children who can’t wait to tear into it.  If you don’t have the time or the space to grow your own, this is a great way to get fresh quality (usually organic) produce for a good price!

  Just last year we took on the adventure of raising our own chickens for eggs. I have to say, it has been more fun than I imagined! Even at two years old, my daughter asks every day to go feed “her” chickens. She loves collecting the eggs and putting them in her basket. Our chickens are free range, with a hen house at night for predator protection, so they are frequently chased around the yard for hugs. This spring we even raised baby chicks, and now have a total of nine hens and two roosters (oops! The boys were supposed to be girls but we love them anyway). 

We are currently getting our garden ready for this season, planting seeds and looking for worms. There’s nothing like picking a handful of fresh strawberries out of your own backyard for an afternoon snack. There are sure to be many more adventures for us in the future, and I hope that I can raise happy, healthy, well rounded children in the process.

 

Guest post: Food for thought

An amazing friend of mine recently had a baby boy, who is one year old now (and incredibly adorable). She also recently started a blog called Real House Mom where she writes about the challenges and joys of being a parent. I asked for her permission to republish her latest post, which discusses how and why to make baby food from scratch. So here it is!

I remember getting stressed about how I would transition Bentley to solid foods.  There are so many things to consider: What foods do I start with?  How much should I give him?  Which brand do I trust?

It’s amazing how these things just worked themselves out without me needing to calculate much of anything.  Bentley, like most babies (I’m assuming), was eager to eat solids and easily slipped into a routine of when and how much he ate.  A factor that I firmly believed made things easier was that I pureed his food myself.

It sounds like a laborious task, and yes, chopping sweet potatoes or squash can be extremely tedious, but the benefits are worth it.  First of all, there are no additives to preserve the food.  Also, the food you make on your own is not cooked in mass quantities like store bought food, so there is a significantly stronger taste.

You might be thinking, “But I work full-time, there is no way I’d have time for this.”  Well, with that kind of attitude, you most certainly won’t have time.  But think about the benefits for your child and maybe sacrificing a night or two a week won’t seem so bad.  In fact, I know working moms who have done just that and still manage to stay sane.  So, you can do it.  If you want to.

You might also be thinking, “Ugh…I hate cooking.”  I had that exact feeling.  I still don’t like to cook.  But making food for Bentley was more like a project than a chore.  I also felt a great sense of pride and accomplished when I was done…and it was an even better feeling if he liked the food!

I normally made two batches of food over the course of two nights per week.  Different foods require different amounts of time, but usually the entire process was 90 minutes (this includes peeling & chopping, which can take a long time for a novice like me). Here is a breakdown of the cooking process:

• Wash, peel (if needed), & chop food
• Steam/boil food (a steamer is best, but I boiled my food)
• Transfer food to a blender & puree (some people use a heavy duty machine…I have a blender)
• Pour pureed mix into ice cube tray, freeze overnight
• Dump cubes in a freezer safe ziplock bag, keep frozen until use

See???  It’s not that bad.  As your child gets older and becomes a pro eater, the recipes can get more complicated, but they also get more fun (and tasty).  Making your child’s food is truly a labor of love.

As a result of this process, I am very passionate about skipping the “Graduate” foods altogether. Nick and I have not made a single baby food purchase (besides rice cereal), and we don’t think Bentley is missing out.  The baby food industry would probably hate me for saying this, but your child does not need that stuff…he/she can eat whatever you’re eating as long as it’s not a choking or allergy hazard.

If making food isn’t for you (and I understand not everyone wants to do this), please make sure you read the nutrition labels.  I was disgusted when I compared “Banana Yogurt Bites” (made for babies) to dried banana chips (made for kids/adults).  The yogurt bites listed “sugar” before “banana puree” whereas the chips had one ingredient: bananas.

And remember, you are what you eat.  Your child is depending on YOU to make him the best he can be.

Image via mush: homemade baby food, which seems like a pretty cool blog as well

Local highlight: food and garden education at the Allen Neighborhood Center

one of the greenhouse's customers

Lately I have been volunteering at an awesome place called the Allen Neighborhood Center on the east side of Lansing. They do a lot of amazing things to bring food access to this part of the city, including holding one of Lansing's few farmers markets, offering cooking and gardening workshops, and helping neighborhood residents get health care and food assistance. They also have a beautiful greenhouse in a nearby park, where staff and volunteers work to grow vegetables for a CSA.

CSAs are a great idea in general, because they offer fresh fruits and vegetables all spring and summer. But it's often hard for families to purchase one, since they require paying several hundred dollars at the beginning of the growing season. Allen Neighborhood Center's CSA attempts to eliminate that financial barrier, by offering several payment options, including monthly payments throughout the growing season, a reduction in price by volunteering in the greenhouse, and use of your Bridge card (aka food stamps).

And! My favorite part is the youth education that goes along with the growing of vegetables. The  center offers a free program twice a week after school, right in the greenhouse, called KidsTime. Neighborhood kids in grades K-5 can come, free of charge, to learn about healthy eating, exercise, and the food system. I've been going on Tuesdays to help out, and it's usually the highlight of my day. Last week their fabulous lead educator led the kids in a great activity - they split into groups to create their own smoothie recipe, then opened a "business" making and selling their unique smoothies to each other (using Monopoly money as currency). Afterwards, they reflected on why smoothies are a healthy snack, as well as the challenges of running a food business.

In past weeks kids have played vegetable Twister, made worm compost bins, and learned how to read nutrition labels. These activities are very similar to the ones I used to teach with Seven Generations Ahead, as well as in a class I taught in New York called "You Are What You Eat." As I've said before, food education is a vital part of getting kids to eat (and love) healthy food. These are the kinds of programs that need to be a regular part of classrooms across the country, not just in optional after-school classes. But until that's a reality, we need to continue to support wonderful initiatives like Allen Neighborhood Center's KidsTime. For more information on how to support them, see their website.

Photo source: Allen Neighborhood Center

What the new school lunch menus will (hopefully) look like

The USDA put out a proposed before/after menu for schools, comparing what old lunches look like (hot dogs, pizza, tater tots...basically baseball game food) to what the new ones should look like when schools start following the new guidelines. Hooray! The new menu looks fantastic. These are the types of meals I would like my students to be eating. But, like I said in my previous post, now kids need to be taught how and why to eat these new healthy foods. Otherwise they won't eat them.

Here is some other coverage of the new lunch regulations:

Marion Nestle on Food Politics (who says kids need to be taught where their food comes from for this to work)
NY Times (which says that the potato industry is apparently still upset that "the potato is being downplayed in favor of other vegetables." Good.)
Fed Up with Lunch (who says kids need more time to eat these healthy lunches...currently they get about 15 minutes at most schools)

Healthy school food needs to come with healthy food education

Today Michelle Obama announced the new nutrition standards for public school lunches. The standards call for doubling the amount of fruits and vegetables, offering only whole-grain foods, and reducing fat and sodium. She had a great quote, saying

When we send our kids to school, we have a right to expect that they won’t be eating the kind of fatty, salty, sugary foods that we're trying to keep from them when they're at home. We have a right to expect that the food they get at school is the same kind of food that we want to serve at our own kitchen tables.

She is right. Parents do have a right to expect healthy food be served at their kids' schools. But I don't think that kids will automatically eat these more nutritious lunches. Kids are very used to the fatty, salty, sugary foods that are so bad for them. Thus, when healthier foods are introduced, they're less likely to eat them. It's not just because "kids are picky eaters." Yes, some kids are picky eaters. But for the most part, kids will eat foods they are familiar with. They are very familiar with pizza, and chicken nuggets, and french fries. Why? Because this is what they are eating at fast food restaurants, at school, and sometimes at home. Most kids are NOT familiar with eggplant, couscous, kale, and garbanzo beans. So they don't eat them. (Would YOU eat a strange-colored, squishy and/or crunchy food that you had never seen before?)

Fortunately, this is not an insurmountable problem. With healthy lunches should come healthy food education. Kids need to be thinking about healthy food, learning about healthy food, getting excited about healthy food. The earlier a child is introduced to healthy eating habits, the more likely she is to keep these healthy eating habits.

Schools need to bring in chefs, farmers, and nutritionists to talk to their students. They need to model healthy eating habits by eating school lunches (or their own vegetable-packed homemade lunches) right next to their students. They need to make vegetables, fruits, and other unprocessed foods seem more familiar, more appetizing. And last, they need to be teaching kids about food on a regular basis. This means teaching them how to cook it, how to grow it, how to eat it.

Middle school students design a poster
explaining why green foods are so good for you

I have been working with Seven Generations Ahead, the farm-to-school organization in Chicago that I have mentioned before, to help create a food curriculum for teachers of 5th-8th grade students. The curriculum, called Linking Plants and Food, hits on all the important aspects of healthy food education: how to cook it, how to grow it, how to eat it. It also delves into issues of food justice and access and sustainable farming. This curriculum will get students thinking about food and developing healthy eating habits. Our hope is that, while school lunches slowly become healthier, kids will slowly become healthier eaters who understand where their food comes from.

Linking Plants and Food is set to be released in the next few weeks. I am so excited to see it, and use it in my classes. For more information on Linking Plants and Food, see sevengenerationsahead.org or contact act@sevengenerationsahead.org. I will repost as soon as it is officially released!

How bad is it? The childhood obesity epidemic

Take a look. Some of these facts are pretty frightening. We need to do something about this.

Brought to you by MAT@USC Masters in Teaching

The frustrating fight for healthier school lunches

The headline of this article caught my eye: School Lunch Proposals Set Off a Dispute. What is there to dispute, I wondered? The first paragraph, which described the changes that the USDA wants require in school lunch menus, made perfect sense to me. Cut back on potatoes, add more fruits and vegetables, and reduce salt. Kids couldn't have more than two servings of starchy vegetables a week, so this would cut back on French fries and other forms of potatoes, and would add in new produce like spinach and peaches. I like this idea, a lot. Forty percent of children's daily calories come from the lunch they eat at school. So, we should make those lunches healthier. What's not to like about this idea?

Apparently, a lot. The USDA is facing a whole slew of people who don't want these regulations to pass. This includes senators from potato-producing states (who say we shouldn't limit the amount of starchy food kids consume), food lobbyists (who say that kids won't eat the new vegetables), and frozen food companies (who say the reduced-salt guidelines will be too costly to follow). Because these people have so much power and sway in our country, the USDA guidelines will likely not pass.

This frustrates me beyond belief.

As a substitute teacher in an urban Michigan area, I teach in a lot of schools and get to see a lot of school lunches. Not once have I seen a meal that I would be willing to eat. Friday's lunch, served to the kindergarten class where I was subbing, was no exception. The main "entree" was a gigantic piece of bread with an inch of greasy white cheese melted on top. This came with milk (plain, chocolate or strawberry -- and which option do you think most kids took?), tiny carrot sticks, a flavored yogurt tube, and a frozen fruit popsicle. While this isn't the worst meal I could think of, it's laden with sugar, and most students probably didn't eat the healthiest item they were offered - the carrots. It's understandable that the kids don't eat carrots when they can fill up on all the other sugary options.

Who eats these types of lunches? Mostly students who receive free or reduced-price lunch, which means they are from low income families. And which group of children has the highest obesity rate in the U.S.? Children from low-income families, and children of color.

This is particularly frustrating when I compare it to the food offered where I taught last year, at a private school in upstate New York. This school had a daily salad bar with multiple greens, grains, and vegetables offered. The entrees included lentil meatloaf, vegetable stir fry, and curry beef stew. The meat was locally sourced and usually organic, and dessert was only served on Thursdays.

Who eats these types of lunches? Students from middle- and upper-income families.

I know that it's not realistic for all public schools to serve organic beef and an elaborate array of freshly chopped vegetables. They have a tight budget and limited kitchen staff. But no one is asking for that kind of a menu. The USDA is asking for meals that are just slightly healthier. A few less potatoes, a little less salt, and a bit more vegetables. In a country that claims to care about its children's health, this shouldn't be too much to ask.

Photo credit

Hunger in America, represented on Sesame Street

A friend of mine sent me a link to a story that surprised me. Apparently Sesame Street will be debuting a new Muppet character, named Lily, who is food-insecure (which is the government's word for "hungry"). This makes me simultaneously sad and happy. Sad because the number of hungry children in the country is so great that it necessitates a TV character to represent it. Happy because children who are not hungry will learn about those that are, in a gentle and powerful way.

Hunger is a huge and basic issue for so many families in America. 49 million Americans live in food-insecure houses, which includes 16 million children. And evidently, food pantries are struggling to feed people, both because the number of hungry people is increasing, and because their budgets are being cut. Hunger is a problem in big cities, and it's also a problem in the suburbs.

But primarily, hunger is a problem of poverty. Forty percent of families below the poverty line are food insecure. Children who are hungry are more likely to do poorly in school, have developmental problems, and suffer from illness and depression, conditions which presumably increase the likelihood that they will stay poor. With one in six people hungry in the U.S., this might just be the biggest problem that many (including myself) haven't been paying attention to.

To learn how many people are suffering from hunger in your state, click on this map and hover over your state. And click here for ideas on how to help.

Fresh from the farm at school

As some people know, when I lived in Chicago I worked as a teacher for a fabulous non-profit organization called Seven Generations Ahead. The organization has a lot of programs that work towards building healthy and sustainable communities in the Chicago area, including my personal favorite, a program called Fresh from the Farm.

Fresh from the Farm teachers go into classrooms and summer school programs to teach kids about healthy eating, gardening, and cooking. They also work with schools to bring local, healthy foods into school lunch programs. And they recently sponsored another awesome idea, called Truck Farm, which is Chicago's first farm-on-wheels. They're part of the burgeoning farm-to-school movement, which helps schools connect with farmers to bring in fresh, local foods. For more information on the farm-to-school movement, click here...and here...and here.

I love this organization, and the year I spent with them was incredibly educational and exciting. I became a big advocate for local and healthy foods education, and continued to teach it when I moved to New York. Thus, I thought I should dedicate a post to Fresh from the Farm, and highlight their awesome new online resource center. The site has tons of links to curriculum, recipes, articles on obesity and nutrition, and resources for building school gardens. And if you know any teachers who live in the Chicago area, send them to the Fresh from the Farm teacher training, so they can learn to teach the program in their own classrooms!

For more detailed information on what the Fresh from the Farm program is all about, read this article in Chicago's Mindful Metropolis magazine.

Health claims on unhealthy foods need to go

There's currently a debate raging right now over whether food companies should be allowed to advertise  unhealthy foods to kids. One side of the debate believes that, to fight the childhood obesity epidemic, we need to put limits on which foods can be marketed to kids (aka no commercials for foods that have high amounts of saturated fat, sugar, etc). The other side believes that food companies themselves should be responsible for deciding what they can advertise.

I've found that when I bring up this issue with others, I often get the "why should the government be involved" response. After all, they explain, childhood obesity is largely due to parents' irresponsibility. It's the parents' job to choose which foods children buy and eat. If a child has an unhealthy diet, it's the parents' fault.

I have a pretty big problem with this response (as you might have guessed). Parents are faced with dozens of decisions to make for their kids each day. Ideally, choosing healthy foods for their children should be one of the easier decisions. But instead, parents are swimming in a sea of confusing food products when they enter the grocery store, and many unhealthy foods make health claims that are pretty convincing. And now, a new study shows that these health claims (like "Cocoa Krispies supports your child's immunity") indeed do mislead parents and increase the likelihood that they'll buy these unhealthy foods for their children.

See, in my opinion, almost all parents are trying to do the best they can, and that certainly includes feeding healthy food to their children. But there is a whole mess of things that make this harder for them -- ridiculous health claims on foods that are really not good for you, lack of education and knowledge about how to purchase and prepare healthy food, terrible lunches served at school, and, in some areas, a complete lack of affordable and fresh food nearby. So, for all these reasons, parents are not the only ones at fault when it comes to childhood obesity and malnutrition. And I believe food companies need to be held responsible.

Why we need to ban Happy Meals

So, there is a debate raging in the public health world about Happy Meals. Health advocates are trying to  ban McDonald's and other fast food restaurants from handing out toys with kids' meals, since the meals are completely unhealthy and the toy prize just makes kids want them even more. The fast food industry, on the other hand, says that the government shouldn't decide what kids eat, their parents should. (Conservatives, I should add, also strongly agree with this statement. It fits in so well with their fear of a "nanny government," and any attempts at regulating the crap that children are encouraged to eat. For a golden example of this, recall when Sarah Palin handed out cookies to school children in order to mock Michelle Obama's anti-obesity campaign.)

Honestly, at first I wasn't sure where I stood on this issue. I understand that parents are leery of elected officials deciding what their kids eat. There is something sacred and private about the meals we eat at home. But after a long time thinking about it, I now whole-heartedly agree with the public health advocates who are pushing to ban Happy Meals. Happy Meals are not something we eat in the privacy of our family kitchens. They are high-calorie, unhealthy meals that are marketed deliberately towards children on TV, billboards, stores, and other public places.

Let's take a closer look at what's offered in the Happy Meals at McDonald's. The choices for a Happy Meal are a hamburger, a cheeseburger, or chicken nuggets. They come with a soda and fries. Well, McDonald's also offers other choices for drinks (milk or apple juice) and a side (apple slices). But the default Happy Meal comes with the soda and fries, which automatically means fewer families will order the healthier option. (See this article on why it's important to make healthy meals the default at restaurants.)

Let's pretend the kid chooses the chicken nuggets meal option, with fries and chocolate milk. This means she is eating a meal that gives her 580 calories, 26 grams of fat, 710 milligrams of sodium, and 25 grams of sugar. To put this in perspective, this one small meal provides 41% of recommended daily calories, 65% of daily fat, 60% of daily sodium, and 200% of recommended daily sugar intake. In other words, way too much.

Now, I don't have an issue with children eating these meals every now and then. But for many families, especially those in food deserts that have many fast food restaurants and few healthier options, these meals are a regular part of the diet. They're cheap, they're fast, and kids love them. Happy Meals come with a toy. Seriously, what kid turns down a meal that comes with a free toy and box with a huge smile on it? As a matter of fact, what kid wouldn't beg for that meal?

There aren't two ways to look at this issue. We don't market cigarettes to kids anymore, because cigarettes are terrible for kids. Happy Meals are terrible for kids. They shouldn't be marketed towards them.

Either fast food restaurants need to step up and offer healthier meals with their free toys, or we need to ban Happy Meals altogether.

Sources: McDonald's, Los Angeles Times, Mayo Clinic 
Photo Source: Gunaxin

More kid posts

One of our healthy eating activities,
discovering and graphing the number of
seeds in cherry tomatoes

Here are some more essays from the 4th/5th graders on how to live a healthy life. The first one is a letter from two doctors to a patient seeking health advice. I especially love the final tag-line.

Dear "troubled person,"

Hi! So, you may have a problem. If all other diets fail, and you want to help yourself, you've come to the right place. You should start by finding a workout schedule. Then start going outside more! (It gives you Vitamin D.) Then throw out all of your "junky stuff" and start counting calories. Then come to me and my assistant. You should ask us about proper vitamins and what foods give you what.

For instance, you should eat orange and yellow food because it has Vitamin A and makes your skin, hair, and eyes healthier. Red foods have Vitamin C. Blue foods have antioxidants. White foods have potassium. Green foods have iron, antioxidants, and fiber which makes you feel full and digests your food. So, make a rainbow salad!

Thank you for having service with us. Remember, lose that flab and trade it with ab.

This next essay is written by three 5th grade boys who describe how they stay healthy. It makes me wish I could list "climbing trees" as one of my health strategies!

The way we stay healthy is we do bike rides, chin ups, pushups and sit ups. Also on Wednesdays and Fridays we run about one mile. We try not to eat junk food. I am giving up ice cream and other fattening foods. Also we climb trees and other outside things. We eat fruits, vegetables, and meat for protein, and different vitamins.

Some of us get 8 hours of sleep and we don’t drink those sugary sports and soda drinks. We play sports and do jujitsu.

Nutrition advice from the 4th and 5th graders

Students made tomato, basil
and mozzarella creations

Here is some more advice from 4th and 5th graders, this time about how to choose healthy foods. 

One thing you can do to make yourself healthy is exercising and eating organic foods. You can look for organic foods at farmers markets and local food stores. Good healthy snacks are things you grow in your garden. Things you get from local farms are also good for you. 

Here are good snack foods: Wheat Thins, apples, oranges, bananas, grapes, fruit salad, tomatoes, nuts, and organic ice pops. Healthy drinks are: v8, orange juice, apple juice, milk, water, and 100% juice.

And some more advice from the doctors to their patients:

Playing with our healthy food

To have a better life, you need to have a better diet. This is what we like to call the "Sidney and Co. Routine." One thing you could do is eat healthier like eating fruits and vegetables. Green foods will help you stop eating so much because it has so much fiber in it and fiber makes you full so you don't get so tempted to have more. Another food that will help you is purple and blue foods because if you are feeling lazy and tired, that could be symptoms of a sickness. So the antioxidants in the purple and blue foods will help keep you from getting sick. You should have red foods because they have Vitamin A which helps you when you are sick, so your immune system feels better. You should have all of these foods because they will all help you to have a healthier life.

Students reflect on how to live healthy lives

Learning to make healthy snacks

For the next few days, I'll be posting short essays on how to live a healthy life written by 4th and 5th graders at Poughkeepsie Day School. In the class I teach called "You Are What You Eat," my students learn about all aspects of healthy eating, including the importance of eating a rainbow of colors (different colored foods give you different nutrients), how to make healthy snacks, and what foods to eat in moderation.


Some students wrote about what steps they take to live healthy lives. Others pretended to be doctors giving health advice to patients. Read on to hear their simple and inspirational advice.

Dear patient,

You can feel better if you eat fruits and veggies and get some more sleep. Also get more exercise. These things will help you feel a lot better than you did feel. Start doing these things as soon as you get this. And for snack, lay off those sweets. You can eat things like apples, blueberries, oranges, strawberries, pears, carrots, tomatoes, salad, bananas, and homemade soup. Put in your schedule to go to the gym every day. No slacking, not at all, you! There are a lot of things that can help. You should eat these things because they will help you grow and feel better.

I hope you feel better soon.

From,

your doctor

Why isn't obesity an election issue?

As I've mentioned multiple times before, obesity is a huge issue affecting millions of people. Fully one third of Americans are obese or overweight, and one in five elementary school children. This is a shocking statistic that should have us all running around like crazy trying to find a solution, no matter the cost. But our politicians, with the valiant exception of Michelle Obama, are basically ignoring the situation. One of my favorite bloggers, Yoni Freedhoff of Weighty Matters, wrote this excellent article that I just had to share. While he writes from a Canadian perspective, the situation in the U.S. is almost identical. Thanks to Mr. Freedhoff for his permission to reprint it. I haven't changed any words except when inserting "Americans" for "Canadians."

So here we are in [America] in the midst of an election. Promises are being made, platforms are being unveiled, and politicians are prowling the land.

So let's pretend for a moment there was this problem in [America]. A public health problem, and it was a biggie.

Let's say there was a virus out there, and for arguments sake, let's say it was killing 25,000 [Americans] a year while afflicting millions. And if that's not bad enough, lets say that this virus was a particularly nasty one, in that if it didn't kill you, it markedly increased your risk of getting a whole slew of other medical conditions. Worse yet, this virus wasn't silent. Infection with this virus was visible to the naked eye, and consequently sufferers became regular targets of societal bias. Infection also lead many to suffer with marked fatigue, and also made completing activities of daily living more challenging, with difficulty rising with degree of infection.

Let's say too that while there was no vaccine or treatment that worked for everyone, there were both public health and medical interventions that might make a difference, if even just to combat the rising negative bias in society, as sufferers were ridiculed regularly, and even had their visible affliction leading them to lower salaries and fewer promotions. Let's also say that amazingly and shockingly, medical schools and other health care professions weren't being taught how to deal with this virus, and that the media had a bad habit of blaming those with it as being personally responsible for contracting it.

And let's say that one quarter of all [Americans] were infected.

I'm guessing that virus would be one hell of an election issue.

And yet the leaders and parties are virtually silent on obesity, a chronic relapsing disease that kills, sickens, stigmatizes, and challenges millions of [Americans]. Our medical schools don't teach our young doctors how to deal with it, and our government spends comparatively nothing on it. 

... Someone's got to stir things up! 

We need politicians to see this as a priority, and we shouldn't elect those that don't.

A sense of wonder

One of my personal heroes, Rachel Carson, wrote a fabulous book called A Sense of Wonder, in which she encourages parents and teachers to cultivate in their children a sense of wonder about the natural world. As I've written before, I believe that time outdoors in nature is an essential part of a healthy childhood. But I also believe that simply allowing kids to wonder about the marvels of the world will cultivate a healthy childhood. Far too often, we expect kids to passively digest information about the world through tv programs and computers, without encouraging them to become active and curious about the (non-digital) world around them. One of the teachers at my school, whose fourth- and fifth-grade students have their own blog, recently asked her students one simple question: What do you wonder?

Each student wrote a journal entry responding to this question, and their answers were so refreshing and interesting that I had to share them with others. 

How did the first living thing come to life?

What would the world be like without people?

What do I sound like?

Are there aliens, and if so, do they call their world THE world?

Why won't Muammar Qadafi leave so there can be peace again?

How long will the earth live?

Why do I like eating so much?

Why do people have a soft spot for things?

What does a cigarette taste like to the ones who are addicted?

What will my job be?

Will we have hovercrafts in the future?

I wnder wy I cant spl?

I wonder how they came up with Legos?

I wonder how the earth was created? 

Why do all people look different?

What is fire? 

 What happens when people die?

Who IS God?

Are dogs ticklish? 

Why is snow white?

I wonder will there be a WWWIII?

I wonder how they make glass.

I wonder who had the idea to make life-saving windshield wipers.

I wonder how the sun was made. 

How long will the earth live?

This is just a small selection of student wonders; you can read the entire list here. I hope this list of wonderings has inspired you as much as it has me. It has motivated me to get outside, explore more, run more, read more, learn more. As Rachel Carson so beautifully puts it,  "Those who dwell among the beauties and mysteries of the earth are never alone or weary of life."

A unique prescription for healthy living

Now that spring is finally emerging from an unusually winter-y winter here in New York, my feet are itching to be outdoors. It seems that each year, my beginning-of-the-year resolution to get more outdoor exercise isn't fully achieved until March, when the cold weather has finally passed. But as we know, most Americans spend too little time outdoors all year long. The average adult spends most of his/her day in front of a screen, and kids spend a shocking seven hours a day with electronic media, according to reports from the Kaiser Family Foundation and the National Wildlife Foundation. It goes without saying (but I'll say it) that so much sedentary time in front of a screen is not good for our health, increasing the risk of all sorts of problems, including cardiovascular disease, obesity, and asthma.

As a teacher, it's astonishing and more than a little depressing to realize that kids spend as much time in front of a screen as they do at school. But lately, I've been hearing about an innovative way to fight against the tide of sedentary lifestyles in children. Pediatricians in Las Vegas have begun giving prescriptions for nature to children. The National Environmental Education Foundation launched a program called the Children and Nature Initiative, which trains health care providers to recommend time in nature, rather than pills, as a prescription for health. (It's only when appropriate according to the child's needs, of course, but I think it's always appropriate to spend more time in nature). For kids suffering from obesity, diabetes, asthma, and certain mental health issues, the doctors are now recommending more time spent in national parks and local nature sites. Here is the story from a doctor participating in the movement.

I think this is fantastic. There is an endless list of benefits to spending more time in nature. It reduces levels of many afflictions affecting Americans, from ADHD and asthma to obesity and heart disease. Studies show that outdoor walking does more for mental health than indoor exercise, and that kids who move from urban environments to greener environments have increased levels of cognitive functioning. Plus, getting outdoors will help you get to know your environment, so that you can appreciate (and ultimately help conserve) the land around you. Another bonus.

So, even if your doctor doesn't write you a prescription for spending time outdoors, it's highly recommended. As the National Park Service chief of conservation Rick Potts puts it, "Science is validating what moms have known for generations: Being outside is good for your health." Spring is finally on its way, and the days are getting longer. Let's spend more of them outside.