"Always" and "Sometimes" Foods

On Tuesday October 26, I had the opportunity to "teach the children about Nutrition". This post explains how I went about doing that.

Instead of simply telling the children what to eat and what not to eat, I took a new approach. I developed a simple activity for them with the explicit goal of teaching them to associate the food they eat with the way they feel on a daily basis.

In the activity, the children were taught to make a distinction between Sometimes Foods and Always Foods. This is a concept which has recently been used with varying degrees of success all over the Western United States.

Part of my rationale behind using this concept is that it eliminates explicit connotations of "good" and "bad" or "healthy" and "unhealthy" that are traditionally a part of nutrition education. All too often nutrition teaching aims to motivate healthier choices by means of guilt. In my opinion guilt is a bad reason to make healthier choices. I feel that healthier choices should only arise out of a desire to live up to one's fullest potential. It's a much harder concept to teach a four-year old - but hey, you gotta hand it to a guy for trying, right?

Depending on where you get your nutritional data, and whether the source is corporately-funded or not, you may have different beliefs regarding which foods are healthy to eat always and which foods fall into the sometimes category. Truth is, which foods go where is only of secondary importance at this point. It's not about telling them to "eat this" or "not to eat that" but rather, getting them to pay attention to the fact that food habits influence their emotional and energetic states and can alter the way they feel and function at school.

I developed instructions for carrying out the activity, here they are:

After the activity, Ms.Ferley had the children draw Sometimes Foods and Always Foods on a sheet of paper, which looked like this:

This one was my favourite. The Red Cucumber really did it for me.

Strange as it may appear, psychological research literature suggests that an activity such as this may go a much longer way in building a foundation for healthy eating habits than would a lecture on what is healthy, what is unhealthy, what is good, what is bad, what is right, what is wrong... after all, the world's not black and white, right? The literature states that making associations between concepts (such as food and feelings) as opposed to being taught concepts without associations (this food is good, this food is bad) enables them to be remembered much more clearly. Also, when emotion is thrown into the learning-mix, the whole experience becomes enhanced, further boosting the child's ability to remember what is being taught.

If you liked this concept along with the rationale behind it, take it. Use it. Go forth with it! Consider a discussion with your child about the powerful connection between food and feelings.

     - Nicholas

References:

Bridge, D., Chiao, J., & Paller, K. (2010). Emotional context at learning systematically biases memory for facial information. Memory & Cognition, 38(2), 125-133. Retrieved from CINAHL database.

Old, S., & Naveh-Benjamin, M. (2008). Differential Effects of Age on Item and Associative Measures of Memory: A Meta-Analysis. Psychology & Aging, 23(1), 104-118. doi:10.1037/0882-7974.23.1.104.