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THE HOMEWORK FILES: |
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1. Introduction |
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You are what you eat, the saying goes, and certainly what you put into your body greatly affects your health and well-being. You can find out more about nutrition, fitness, and healthy habits with the resources offered in this edition of the Student Homework Files.
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FEED ME! What do you eat, and how much do you eat? These are two important questions that enormously impact your well-being. Visit the food pyramid in the first link, learn about healthy choices, and then use the chart on the 2nd link to create your own food diary. YOUR SELF: How do you view yourself? What do you know about keeping your body healthY? Do you know what BMI refers to? What's your physical activity like? Find numerous activities and some good advice in this student guide to keeping a healthy body and mind. HEALTHY EATING FOR TEENAGERS: What kinds of food and nutrients should you be eating? What is a healthy weight for you? Find dietary advice and requirements, a pyramid food guide table, discussions on body image and weight management, and tips for food safety here. FOOD GUIDE PYRAMID: Here's a brief guide to understanding the components and the portions of the food pyramid - an essential step in knowing what it takes to eat a balanced diet and stay healthy. NUTRITION AND FITNESS CENTER: Weight, food facts, recipes, special diets, staying fit, exercise... it's all here, and it's written especially for you! NUTRITION SCIENCE ANIMATIONS: From digestion to metabolism, sports nutrition to water soluble vitamins, nutrition is explained in scientific terms in these online animations for high school students.
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EXAMINING NUTRITION LABELS: You've all seen them, but what exactly are they saying? Learn how to decipher the nutrition labels you find on all food products, and soon you'll be examining everything you eat! A great nutrition project would be to create a comparison poster of nutrition labels of what students are eating for lunch; interview students at lunch time, grab their containers, ask them if they know what nutrients they're eating, then do an analysis and comparison study. FOOD ADDITIVES: What are all those colors, preservatives, sweeteners, flavor enhancers, and otherwise long names added to the foods that you eat? Get the skinny here. GENETIC FOOD MODIFICATION: What is genetic modification of our food? Is it dangerous? Should we be concerned? What are the current debates on the subject? Learn all about this hot topic in food production, and how it affects the environment, yield crops, diversity, and sustainability.
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4. FOOD PACKAGING AND ADVERTISING . . . ADVERTISING AND FOOD PRODUCTS: Wow! You should see the bottles of soda - all new looks for some familiar flavors. Food companies will go to great lengths to get your attention, all to have you buy their product based upon cool or attractive packaging and strong advertising campaigns. There's nothing that replaces being an informed consumer, however. Take a look at how packaging and advertising affects your food purchases and consumption. |
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5. FOOD SAFETY AND HANDLING . . . FOOD SAFETY REFERENCE GUIDE: Learn how to safely handle, store, cook, and serve all categories of food with the resources found at this site from the FDA. Use the 2nd link above for an interactive chain to follow food safety practices from farm to table. FOOD SAFETY TOPICS: Covering safe handling procedures, botulism, food safety and storage, pesticides and food, food allergens, outdoor eating tips, and retail handling of food, these sites offer a good deal of information on food safety topics
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6. FOOD ALLERGIES . . . UNDERSTANDING FOOD ALLERGIES: What are some of the most common types of foods that kids can be allergic to? Do you have any food allergies, or do you know someone who does? Get more information on food allergies and reactions here, and download the food allergy poster, in both English and Spanish, at the last link above. |
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7. ORGANIC FOODS & VEGETARIANS . . . ORGANIC FOODS: It's the by-word of the day - organic foods. Whether milk or potato chips, you can buy organic. What does it mean? What does going organic do for you? Learn more about this trend in foods, and decide whether organic foods are for you. VEGETARIAN CHOICES: Many teens select to become vegetarians. The choices you make in following this dietary lifestyle must be balanced for proper nutrition. Make sure you know all the angles. |
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8. SPORTS AND FITNESS . . . SPORTS NUTRITION: For kids that are super-charged and intensively involved in sports, you're going to need to make sure your nutritional habits are extra good. Learn more about sports nutrition with these links. HEALTHY & FIT IN HIGH SCHOOL: Take a look at the health and fitness topics that affect high school teenagers, both before and after you graduate. From "How to avoid getting sick" to healthy eating habits, weight training inside and out, zit tips, caffeine,sleep, and more, you'll find lots of possible topics of interest for further research or student projects, or for just staying informed. CREATE YOUR OWN FITNESS ACTIVITY CALENDAR: This interactive online feature lets you plug in your fitness activities and goals to create your own individualized fitness calendar. Choose an activity group and time and print out your plan, or clear it all and start again. GIRLS' BONES! Especially addressed to girls' health concerns, this site tells you a lot about how to take care of your bones and stay strong and healthy. |
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9. FOOD IN HISTORY . . . THE FOOD TIMELINE: Nutrition for kids hasn't always held the same ingredients across history. For instance, pistachios were much more important in 7,000 B.C. than they are today! And did you know that yogurt was a favored food in Mesopotamia? Or that popcorn - that wonderful movie theater treat - was used by the Aztecs for ceremonial decoration? How cool is that? Learn about the history of food with this fascinating and interactive timeline. AMERICAN CULINARY HISTORY: The history of food is absolutely fascinating, whether you want to know how school lunches came about, what kinds of meals pioneers prepared, what George Washington's army ate, or what was served up for a Sumerian dinner! |
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10. STUDENT PROJECTSALTERNATE NUTRITION: From raw milk, to raw foods, vegan or vegetarian, there are lots of alternative models of nutrition, and they account for solid financial numbers in the nutrition market. Take one of the areas of alternate foods and nutrition, trace its origins (Why did it start up in the first place? How was it promoted? What are its claims?) and do a research paper and presentation on the topic. NUTRITIONAL BAD BOYS! Sodas, sugary cereals, potato chips, Twinkies, candy... you know them and love them, right? Or is there a change happening in the way we choose our so-called junk foods? Some schools can no longer carry sodas in vending machines; they must carry juice and sports drinks instead. Are those juices necessarily better than sodas? Do read the labels - it all depends on what's inside those containers. Conduct a survey to see what junk foods are favored by students at your school; compare labels between juices, or even some juices and sodas for nutritional content; learn what these "bad boys" of nutrition do to your body and create posters to inform students of the effects; see if students are attempting to go healthier with their snack foods; create a healthy foods snack food campaign; plan a healthy "junk" food exhibit, with free trials of snacks; plan a school-wide moratorium on junk food, or...? Try and address the issue of healthy v.s. junk food snacks today, pursuing an interesting angle to the subject. FOOD AND ADVERTISING: Create your own advertising campaign to make nutritional snacks appealing. What factors should your promotion address? If your school is on a fitness kick, for example, it would be fairly easy to promote such things as Power Bars and sports drinks. How might you package carrot and celery sticks to make them appealing, to sell more of them than candy bars, for instance? Work in groups to choose some foods you wish to promote, then create an eye-popping, winning advertising campaign to win students over. The last two links above are interactive games, designing your own soda ad and designing a cereal box, and while targeted to a younger audience, they provide practice to get you started with your advertising campaign. EATING LOCALLY: Discover what kinds of meals and menus you can create by using only locally produced foods. Give your team a radius of so many miles, find out what is being farmed and produced, and use those foods to create your menus. FOOD SAFETY INSPECTORS: Choose this project to be food detectives. Select a few neighboring restaurants, your own kitchens, and/or your school cafeteria to apply what you know about safe food handling. How do the facilities you use rate? Working with a student group, select criteria and choose a rating scale based on different categories, and rate restaurants and kitchens. Alternatively, create posters to inform students how to safely handle foods, and the dangers involved in not adequately considering food safety. Suggest how to pack a safe school lunch, with guidelines targeted toward lower grades. FOOD ALLERGIES - WHAT'S HIDDEN? Research food allergies and find the common sources of those allergens, including what may often be hidden sources, particularly in prepared or restaurant foods. Make a chart displaying these potential food allergy sources, and create a menu to address these allergens, so that a milk or shellfish sensitive person could safely eat at your restaurant. FAST FOOD! You knew this one was coming.. It's time to analyze your fast food choices. How good is it for you? What are the worst fast food choices? Use this chart to investigate your fast food choices for fat, sodium, cholesterol, and calories. THE HISTORY OF BURGERS & FRIES: They might just be more American than apple pie, though current campaigns hope to change the trend. Take a close look at the inimitable burgers and fries combo - a really close look, and learn something of the history of this duo in American food culture. FOOD TRIVIA GAME: How many pounds of potatoes do American eat every year? How many pizzas? Which food is the most popular take-out item? Which food offers the most vitamin C? If you ate a tomato, cucumber, and lettuce sandwich for lunch, would you have eaten a balanced meal? You can come up with all kinds of trivia questions to put on food cards, decorate them, and create your own food trivia game. FOOD HISTORY MENUS: If you want to learn more about Roman cuisine, what Romeo & Juliet might have eaten, or what early Chinese food in America was like, you should take this project on! For any group of people or earlier culture, research where and how they got their foods, how they were prepared, and create an annotated research menu based on your studies. THE AMERICAN HISTORY OF FOOD: Create a timeline of food in America, from Native American foods, to its earliest European explorations, through pioneer traditions, through to modern California cuisine. Create a mini menu for each entry on your timeline. |
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11. GAMES AND MORE GAMES!!BREAKFAST DETECTIVE: Read the clues, then drag and drop your guess into the mystery box to see if you correctly identified the right food in this online game for elementary students. BUILD A MEAL: Click on the Nutrition Cafe, input your age and gender, then choose your meal and your dish from the menu. Click to find the nutritional information for each of your meals. FOOD PYRAMID CHALLENGE: How well do you know the food groups in the food pyramid? Are you sure? Take this online challenge to see how well you score on nutrition. MISSION NUTRITION: Find the foods with the most sugar, or search for a healthy snack food containing both carbohydrates and protein in this online game. DEM BONES! Go on a scavenger hunt with this online game - a very special scavenger hunt, where you have to collect items needed to have healthy bones. Take an online quiz to see how much you know about bones, and find some cool tools to download. DINING DECISIONS: What does your body need for the best fuel to operate at its optimum energy levels and give you the best performance? What you put into it is important; take this online dining challenge here. NUTRITION SLEUTH: What's missing? Nutritionally speaking, that is. Students must figure out what important nutrient is missing from their diets if, for instance, their scalp is dry and flakey, or they only eat fries & burgers. The game plays out hangman style. PIZZA EXPLORER: |
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