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Thursday, August 28, 2014

Unprepared for the "Real World" - Food

As I've mentioned before, I think schools need to step up their game, especially when it comes to educating students about food and money.  I've touched on the money aspect before, so now it's time to discuss why food education is so important.  I think it's easiest to break this into three sections - cooking classes, nutrition, and school meals.

For me, home ec was a requirement for everybody in middle school, and I took an optional cooking class in high school.  All of these classes focused mainly on baking cookies, cakes, and other desserts and sweets.  Sure, it was fun (and delicious!) but I can guarantee you that if I didn't already know how to cook, these classes wouldn't have helped at all.  I understand it's hard to cook a meal from scratch in a short period of time, but I don't see why you can't find recipes that you can spread over a couple days.  Spend one day chopping up veggies and meat, store in the fridge overnight.  Next day, fry it up into a stir fry.  Explore veggies and different ways to cook them.  And not just potatoes.  This was huge for me.  I thought I hated brussels sprouts because I don't like how they taste (or smell) steamed.  Roasted brussels sprouts, however, have become one of my favorite veggies.

I was lucky to have parents who valued home cooked meals.  That isn't the case for everyone.  Some kids' parents don't know how to cook, or just don't want to take the time to.  While this is a separate problem, it makes it much harder for the kids to learn to cook and eat properly on their own.  You end up with generation after generation of people eating out for every meal who consider making a boxed meal "cooking."  While it's possible to make smart choices at restaurants, not everyone does.  It ends up being bad for you health and bad for your wallets.  With better planned cooking classes, schools could do their part to help break this cycle.

Then, nutrition.  There are people out there who think that the giant frappuccino they get daily at Starbucks has no calories "because it's coffee."  People get mad because they do a quick fad diet and lose weight, but then gain the weight back as soon as they quit the diet and go back to their usual eating habits.  Now, I can understand having trouble determining what's "healthy" and what isn't.  Human nutrition just isn't well understood, as evidenced by the constant flip-flops:  Eggs are bad!  No, eggs are good!  Saturated fat is bad!  No, trans fats are bad!  So on and so forth.

To be honest, I couldn't even tell you where I've learned the bit I know about nutrition.  Some of it was from health and science classes.  We learned about the food pyramid back in elementary school, but I don't know if anyone recommends that anymore.  Again, the lack of knowledge about nutrition is tough to fix because there's still so much we just don't know.  But we should at least be teaching our kids to make smarter choices.  Less processed food is better than super processed scary mush food.  Vegetables are good.  Whether you eat a high fat or low fat diet, fats are higher in calories than carbs and protein.  Just because something is lower in calories doesn't mean it's the healthier choice.  On that line, just because it's home cooked doesn't mean it's healthy.  I once counted the calories in a buffalo chicken calzone I made and almost cried.  Then I ate it.  It was delicious.

Teach kids about BMR and TDEE.  To gain weight, eat above your TDEE.  To lose weight, eat below your TDEE.  When you're at a weight you like, eat at your TDEE.  If your weight and/or activity level changes, so will your TDEE.  This doesn't seem like much, but when you feel like so much of your life is out of your control, just knowing you can control something as small as your weight can make a huge difference.

Last but not least, school lunches.  This is a hotly debated issue, at least according to some TED talks I've seen.  See the problem is, almost anyone can tell you that the stereotypical school lunch isn't that healthy.  Lots of prepackaged, overly processed, fried foods.  Schools will argue that it's all they can afford, and parents aren't willing to give schools more money, even if it's to feed their kids healthier food.  But again, what do we consider healthy?  Childhood obesity is skyrocketing, so we should make the lunches lower in calories, right?  Sounds good, until you consider kids below the poverty line, where a school lunch is often the only meal they are guaranteed.  Pump those school lunches full of nutrient dense, high calorie foods!

You can't just break kids into different lunch lines and say "you're too fat, here's a tiny lunch" and "you're too skinny/poor, here's a big lunch."  A compromise hurts both extremes, but works out fine for the average student.  But we want to help everyone, right?  I don't know how to handle the school lunch situation, but one obvious solution is to just pack your own lunch.  But this is also where nutrition education comes into play.  Kids will trade their lunch for lunch money.  Or just buy lunch as well and eat both lunches.  When you get to high school and can go off campus for lunch, it doesn't matter how healthy the school lunch is when there's a McDonald's across the street...

Ultimately, it all comes down to choice.  Teach kids to make smart choices.  Not everyone will, and there's only so much you can do about that.  It's hard to start cooking healthy meals from scratch when you grew up eating frozen meals everyday and that's all you know.  But given a solid foundation in cooking and nutrition in school, it'll be a lot easier.

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