School garden projects are becoming hugely popular. Over 25 percent of public elementary schools include garden-based learning. Do these gardens improve the education and health of young people?
It’s important to focus on health, not weight.
Flickr/Zhao
Chia, acai, quinoa, guradji - our supermarket shelves are awash with superfoods. They may well be healthy but in attributing magical qualities to these products are we glossing over an often-exploitative global food system?
About 58% of the average household’s food budget is spent on ‘junk’ food.
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A child’s diet should be high in fruit and vegetables, high in complex carbohydrates such as brown bread, brown pasta and brown rice and relatively low in fat and sugary foods. It should also be low in…
Children will learn to like vegetables if they’re regularly exposed to them from a young age.
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Hippocrates said circa 400BC that “food should be our medicine and medicine should be our food”. He would probably turn in his grave if he saw the amount of highly processed, sugary food and drinks marketed…
Fill your boots. Fruit and veg of the unprocessed variety.
Garry Knight
We are on the brink of an important change in how we are encouraged to think about our diet. Britain’s health authorities are considering whether to allow processed or “composite foods” to carry the official…
Diseases linked to smoking tobacco, a lack of exercise, drinking alcohol and eating unhealthily are on the rise, even though we have more information than ever before on the risks involved. All indications…
Nutritious meal inside? Maybe, maybe not.
Lunchbox image via www.shutterstock.com.
Ravenous students, busy parents, nutrition professionals and school officials all have their own ideas about what belongs on the school lunch table. Plenty of criticism centers on the unhealthiness of…
The Eatwell plate is the UK government’s official food guide about which foods we should eat to achieve a healthy diet. It is essentially a pie-chart depicting the recommended intakes of five specified…
Cheap as chips?
Boy shopping via Sonya Etchison/Shutterstock
From celebrity chef Jamie Oliver’s Money Saving Meals to blogging mum Jack Monroe’s 100 Delicious Budget Recipes to the NHS Eat4Cheap campaign, eating well on a budget is now a national pastime. But research…
You always win with fruit.
Children with fruits via alexkatkov/Shutterstock
Poor nutrition is a primary cause behind the rising cost of health care in many developed countries. Although pupils have good knowledge of what is healthy and what is not, that does not always translate…
Growing up on broccoli.
School lunch via Monkey Business Images/Shutterstock
We should be concerned about our children’s diets. In 2011, nearly 10% of four to five-year-olds in the UK were classified as obese. By the time they leave primary school, nearly 20% of children are obese…
Lessons don’t stop during lunchtime.
Anthony Devlin/PA Archive
With the greatest will in the world, packed lunches often end up full of whatever happens to be left in the fridge or what can be grabbed on a tightly scheduled school run. But this can all now change…
If only kids asked for this every day.
Healthy lunchbox via Dream79/Shutterstock
A fifth of four- to five-year-old children in England are overweight or obese, rising to one third by age ten to 11 years. This stark increase during the primary school years points to the potential contribution…