I feel so ignorant about nutrition. My formal education about nutrition began and ended studying the food pyramid in 8th grade. I guess it’s just assumed that after minimal instruction, school children know everything about food, what to eat and how to make it. My informal education began much earlier: being bombarded with commercials from food companies and fast food vendors side-by-side with diet fads and obesity in the popular media.
My readers (you!) really ask some terrific questions that I don’t have the answers to (thankfully lots of other commenters do). But it bothers me that I can’t answer these basic questions about nutrition (and school lunches) so I’m taking a crash course: I checked out a bunch of interesting books at the library. Here’s what I’m going to attempt to read over the next couple months (in my spare time):
Lunch Lessons by Ann Cooper and Lisa Holmes
Healthy Eating by Harvard Medical School
What to Eat by Marion Nestle
Nutrition for Life by Lisa Hark and Darwin Deen
Free for All: Fixing School Food in America by Janet Poppendieck
Do you have any book/audiobook recommendations for me?
First off, I just wanted to say that I think what you're doing is wonderful. I'm a Nutrition major right now, and one of my classes today was just talking about how to counteract, reduce, and prevent childhood obesity. We talked about school lunches, physical activity programs, and – what you mentioned – health education. I never learned about Nutrition before college aside from the basic food pyramid, like you said.
I didn't read through all of the comments that you got so I might be repeating information, but the American Dietetic Association Website (eatright.org) is a really informative resource. It's also National Nutrition Month right now, so they have some extra articles and information available.
Good luck with your search for more information, and I look forward to reading more about your project! It's so refreshing to see people outside of the Nutrition sphere stand up and acknowledge what a huge problem we have on our hands.
I studied art and took a nutrition college class as an option to fulfill one of those upper diversity requirements. At the end of the course, I thought it was one of the most enlightening classes I had ever taken. It was very informative and I think it should be pretty much a required standard.