An adult’s wellness is influenced by the lifelong exercise and nutrition habits that he or she develops as a child. And research demonstrates that good nutrition is linked to better behavior and academic performance. Our team at HeartBeet Cafe arms students, teachers, and families with information on how to make healthier choices to create healthy leaders!
Nutrition and food skills impact us each and every day over our entire lifetime. Our kids spend a significant portion of their childhood in a school setting. In the US, nutrition and food skills are not part of our core school curriculum. In order to impact the health and well-being our our children, we need to effectively integrate food and nutrition skills from Preschool through 12th grade.
Good nutrition and healthy food choices are sometimes taught in the classroom. However, many times foods served in the classroom, in the case of a class party or rewards for good behavior, have no nutritional value. This sends a very mixed message to students that good nutrition can be part of their education, but may not be important to their actual health and well-being. To send a consistent message and enhance our children and families’ health, teachers, staff and parents much collaborate to positively change eating behaviors. Our kids need to receive consistent, reliable, relevant health and nutrition information and, most importantly, real opportunities to use and apply it.
HeartBeet Cafe visits elementary, middle and high schools to help educate students on how to make healthier choices. For our elementary students, we teach during the lunch period, classroom or gym class using our HeartBeet comics and cartoons. For middle and high school, we cater the topics with the school’s focus and supplement the program with taste-tests, nutrition competitions and cooking demonstrations. HeartBeet Cafe also collaborates with school districts to teach them how to integrate nutrition and develop healthy leaders. Click here to learn more.