It is extremely important to educate children about obesity and the causes of obesity. If children know what causes people to become obese they might make it their personal goal to eat healthy and live active lives. Kids at the Ecology-Technology Academy in inner-city Philadelphia learn to eat better by working the soil. Kids take turns planting and cultivating the crops, and they get to taste freshly picked fruits and vegetables, often for the first time. During the summer, Eco-Tech teaches kids to cook healthy meals and invites family members to sample them. A large percentage of our students would have eaten three, four, five nights a week at a fast-food restaurant, but Eco-Tech is changing that (Tyre and Scelfo 62). I think this is a great idea, but I don't think most schools would be able to get at least one acre of land to grow their crops on. I think children would be more interested in eating healthy food, if they were the ones who took the time and dedication to grow it. Eating healthy food is just one of the steps to becoming healthy. Children need to be taught what is healthy and what proportions are healthy.
It is very important for children and adults to know what and how much to eat. Children can benefit from two or three well-planned snacks each day, if they follow the key to healthful snacking. The keys to healthful snacking are timing, total, and type. Children tend to look for snacks as soon as they come home from school, so parents should plan ahead and have healthy snacks in a visible location for children to find. Parents also have to limit snack time to ten to twenty minutes and then send their children off to play. Picking healthy snacks for children can sometimes be a difficult task, but something parents should pay attention to is how processed the food is. The ideal snacks are minimally processed, rich in vitamins and mineral, and light on added ingredients (Tyre and Scelfo 62).
