Healthy Bytes

Better to teach good eating habits than break bad eating habits

read time: about one minute.

CNN Health this morning featured a story on the “HealthBarn USA” - a program created by dietician Stacey Antine. After observing obese kids in a New York hospital, she thought it better to teach kids how to eat BEFORE they wind up in a clinic. Veggies, fruits and whole grains.

It’s a 12 week program for parents and kids. The kids learn how to plant seeds, cultivate and harvest crops. They learn about nutrition as they turn the harvest into meals. They also learn how to read food labels.

An interesting comment from a parent in the program who is also an Orthopedic surgeon… She didn’t get any nutrition education in medical school. Yup. None.

In 2003 the Princeton Review surveyed every US accredited medical school (122) and accredited osteopathic school (19) about nutrition education in their curriculum.
40% (4 in 10) of the schools had a nutrition requirement. The average amount of nutritional training at the schools that required any was 2.5 credit units - about 38 hours.

So 6 in 10 schools have no nutrition requirement at all.
Medical school is about 6,000 lecture hours.

The 2:15 video is worth a watch.
CNN.com/Health click on “Healthy Eating and Kids”

This entry was posted on Sat, 21.Oct.2006 at 8:49 pm and is filed under Nutrition, Lifestyle. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.