Lots of schools have perhaps provided nutrition education to students in courses such as those linked to physical education classes. But other approaches can be more likely to consequence in changes in health behaviors. For instance, a document entitled Guidelines for School Health Programs to Promote Lifelong Healthy Eating (Centers for Disease Control 1996) provides schools with a plan for affecting away from approaches to health education based on the teacher conveying knowledge to students and toward methods that need hands-on involvement and problem-solving by students.
This extensively endorsed publication contains numerous recommendations and ideas for schools to pursue in establishing school-based nutrition education, including assimilation of school food services with the nutrition education curriculum, the training of school staff who will teach nutrition education, the participation of families and communities in school nutrition education curricula, and ways to observe the progress of school health and nutrition programs.
The stress is on involving children and their families in a well-organized, culturally receptive nutrition education plan. Some schools have welcomed special revelation interventions promoting healthy eating and suitable exercise among students. One of these, the CATCH program (Child and Adolescent Trial for Cardiovascular Health) concerned over 5,000 elementary school children in 96 schools in California, Louisiana, and Minnesota between 1991 and 1994 (Luepker et al. 1996).
Schools were erratically chosen as intervention (56) or control (40) schools. Interventions consisted of the completion of specific school-based curricula for food services (such as limiting fat intake to 30 percent of kcals), physical education classes (such as rising the amount of moderate to energetic daily exercise), and the classroom (such as promotion of skills linked to the making of healthy food choices), as well as home-based curricula, which given health information to families and requisite evidence of parental participation and knowledge.
Rather significant results were reported: fat content of school lunches fell from nearly 39 percent to less than 32 percent in intervention schools, compared to a drop from nearly 39 percent to 36. 2 percent in control schools, and physical activity levels drastically increased in intervention schools. Weight changes were not evaluated. Without question, this landmark study demonstrated that very optimistic changes could be made in modifying energy intake and expenditure in school children under well-financed, well-planned conditions.
Regrettably, thousands of other schools in this country may not be competent to adopt the intervention curricula of this or similar studies as of constraints. The U. S. Department of Agriculture’s requirement that, started in July 1998, the total fat content of school lunches could not surpass a weekly average of 30 percent was another attempt to support healthy eating behavior in schools. Although, in concert with what emerges to be the almost universal inclination for adults from any period of American history to see their children as inadequately physically active, the story of physical decline is, it seems one we all know.
Socrates’ often quoted words capture the joining together of these two ideas, such that each generation’s supposedly lazy children are seen as a sign that society itself is going downhill: Children today love luxury. They have bad manners, contempt for authority, disrespect for their elders, and they like to talk instead of work. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up the best at the table, and tyrannize over their teachers.