Choosing healthy foods

A 1.5 hr lesson for kids 6-8 y.o. by Masha Shkolnik

This is a seminar about healthy food choices. We will look at what makes food good or bad, learn how to make smart choices when it comes to eating, and discover what particular foods are good for people. We will learn what is the list of ingredients on packages and will even familiarize ourselves with some of them. We will also speak about organic and natural foods and see how those products are labeled. We will do an experiment and figure out which product has the most vitamin C!

1. We are what we eat

There is a phrase "You are what you eat". It means that our bodies work because we put food in them. food is a fuel for our bodies. if you put bad gasoline into your car it wont run well or maybe would stop in the middle on the street at all. When you water a flower or a plant, you use pure water. You don't pore coca cola on it, or coffee, or the water you have left after washing the floors. because if you do those things the plant will die.

The first time this saying - "You are what you eat" came to America 90 years ago. There was a person named Victor Lindlahr who was studying how the food that we eat affect our health. he said that almost all of the diseases happen because people eat wrong food. By wrong food he meant cheep food that is of bad quality. "Ninety per cent of the diseases known to man are caused by cheap foodstuffs. You are what you eat." he said.

Ask kids: So what do you think this saying means - "You are what you eat"?

Does food live inside us? How do you think food can make us feel good or bad?

2. What is good food and what is bad food?

When we come to this world, we are given our body and our soul. Our soul, meaning who we are, lives inside our body. To be able to live long happy lives, experience many amazing things, travel to other countries, have family, raise children, become grownups, we need strong healthy bodies. We want our skin to be smooth, our muscles - strong, our legs - to be able to carry us and travel around, our ears - to hear, our eyes - to see, our brain - to help us think.

Ask: What can we do to have strong healthy body? Just name different things.

Ok, to have strong bodies we can eat good food. Good food is food that makes us feel good, gives us energy, keeps our organs in good shape. It is food that has vitamins to support our organs.

What is bad food? Food that does not give us energy but gives us stomach ache. Food that our body does not know how to deal with - it cannot digest our food fully, thus people can get sick and fat.

Additives

What makes people want to eat bad foods? In many cases it has something that has been added to food to make it taste good. One of those ingredients is corn syrup. It is a substance that is taken from the corn that tastes like very sugary liquid. it is added to products so that it tastes nicer. Is corn syrup good for us? No. It has a lot of sugar and if we eat things that have corn syrup, our bodies gets extra fat that they don't need.

Let us look at some of the packaging and see what is inside. You don't have to look at the actual product to see what is inside, you just need to read the list of ingredients and it will tell you what this product is made of.

Looking at packages of cereal and orange juice and learning what products are made from. Ask kids to find one ingredient of a food the package of which they are holding and shout out.

How bad a food can be? Listen to this story.

Research about McDonalds

There was a great film called Super Size Me created about 5 years ago (2004). It is about how eating burgers, French fries and drinking sodas in McDonalds can damage your health. A person who created a movie - his name is Morgan Spurlock - decided to eat Mcdonalds food for a month and not to eat anything else. In one month he gained 24 lbs. (a 13% body mass increase, a cholesterol level of 230, and experienced mood swings and fat accumulation to his liver). It took Spurlock fourteen months to lose the weight gained from his experiment.

Of course none of us eats three meals in McDonalds every day and is not going to do such bad things to the body, but nevertheless keep in mind that fast food industry in most cases uses products of a low quality and they won't make your body feel better.

Ask: So what bad foods do you know? By ‘bad’, I don’t mean they will make you sick. Just that you should eat them in moderation. If you want to avoid them all together - it would be great. if you cant avoid them - try not to eat them more than once a week.

Bad foods (when eaten often):

* Most processed foods – which generally contain sugar, salt and fat. What processed foods do we know?

Bacon, Ham, Sausage, Hot dogs, Pepperoni, Salami, Pastrami, Bologna.

The more the product you are going to eat is modified from its original state, the less helpful it is to your body. For example, many years ago to make a flour (which people bake with), people took wheat that they grew on the field, and pressed it between stones, rotated the stones so that wheat became powdery. When people eat bread that was cooked with that flour, they received all the important ingredients that wheat had in it. How does the process of making flour looks nowadays?

Wheat is grown in the fields, than collected and brought to the mill. Before wheat can be ground into flour it must be free of foreign matter. This requires several different cleaning processes. Flour usually contains a small amount of additives. Bleaching agents such as benzoyl peroxide are added to make the flour more white. Oxidizing agents (also known as improvers) such as potassium bromate, chlorine dioxide, and azodicarbonamide are added to enhance the baking quality of the flour. Most states require flour to contain added vitamins and minerals to replace those lost during milling. The most important of these are iron and the B vitamins, especially thiamin, riboflavin, and niacin. So by the time flour reaches us all packed up and sold in the store, it has been manipulated with in so many ways that it does not have much of nutritional value left in it, thus it is not helping our bodies to be stronger! So if you chose to eat bread, for example, please chose the kinds that still have good stuff in it - while wheat, seven grains and other healthy types.

What other kinds of foods are bad?

• Fatty foods like margarines, butter, cream, most cheeses, fatty meat.
• Sugar and sugary foods like cakes, cupcakes, donuts and candies.
• Any soda or diet soda drinks.
• Junk food, fast food: burgers, fries, chips, hot dogs.
• Some products have added colors. Even though they are special food colorings, it is still better to chose food without those.

Let us look at the package of a candy and a soda bottle and see what the ingredients are and see that it has added coloring.

Ask: How can a food look good, have different colors and NOT use food coloring?

4. Good foods and why they are good for people?

Food is best if it is:

- Fresh, uncooked

- Not previously frozen

- Green colored fruits and vegetables

- Organic / natural /no antibiotics / no hormones

What is Organic food and how to look for it?

Organic refers to the way farmers grow and process foods such as fruits, vegetables, grains, dairy products and meat. Organic farmers dont use chemicals and sprays when growing their produce, this it is more healthy. If you can chose between non organic, it is better to buy organic.

List of best foods for longer, healthier life:

• Fish (sushi, grilled, tuna salad)
• All vegetables and especially broccoli and onions
• Salads with leafy greens and oil and vinegar, no mayonnaise
• All berries and especially cranberries
• All fruits and especially lemons
• Oats and other grains
• Teas: green and chamomile

5. Let us see which foods have more vitamin C

Our body can produce vitamins to help it be strong. But there are some vitamins our body cannot produce, so we need to get them from somewhere - mostly from food. Vitamin C that is very important for our health, especially bones and muscles, is not produced by our body, so we have to eat the right foods to get our vitamin C.

Ask: do you know what fruits and veggies have the most of vitamin C? Guess.

Here is an experiment that will help us determine which foods have more vitamin C.

*An experiment with Indophenol blue that is used to test for the presence of vitamin C, changing from blue to colorless in the presence of the vitamin. The reaction between vitamin C and indolphenol bleaches indolphenol, and the color of the reaction mixture can be used to detect the amount of vitamin C.Prepare this vitamin C indicator by mixing 0.1 g of indophenol blue powder in 1 L (1 quart) of distilled water.

Experiment created by German Nudelman, PhD.

6. So, what is next?

Love your body and treat it to good foods - healthy food that will give you energy!

Here is a print out for each of you. let us read all together what it says.

Your Homework:

come home and find 3 different packages, look at them and see weather you can find any information about how good or not good the product is. Look at list of ingredients and see if it has colors and corn syrup in it. And share with your parents today at dinner what we have talked about. Ok?

:)