Eating Habits As A Educational Course

Need to Educate About Eating Habits

Healthy eating can be a great education course that addresses all of the food groups; the advantages and disadvantages of those groups and how to ascertain what our individual needs are from each category.

This is not a difficult concept to be learned but unfortunately this is not taught in any class. Because our society doesn’t feel like it is an issue that should be addressed by our education system.

Let me put this proposition before you, however. Has there always been an apparent need to learn to drive? No, driving wasn’t around before 20 th century. But now, driving is included in the education system, and taught as a matter of course each year.

The need to be educated in the ability to drive is relatively new, and is not one of the earlier school topics, but it’s included because a need developed. Education about our eating is a need that has developed over the last 30 years, and has now reached epidemic portions. So, eating habits should also be included in our education system.

Effect of Advertisements on Our Eating Habits

Advertisements about our eating choices are determined by the need to make a profit. The advertisements, which our children are watching have nothing to do with their real nutritional needs, or the foods that actually are good to eat.

Role of Education System

Here is where the educational process should bridge the gap. Just as our education system teaches our children how to count, read, and write, they should teach them about their good eating habits. We educate our children because knowledge is power.

Knowledge provides them with the power they need to make good decisions, acquire jobs, create new products and procedures, and to live out their lives as they see fit. They also have a fundamental knowledge of how to use the food resources.

Teaching and educating about the fundamentals of the food groups, how they work with your body, the metabolic process of digesting those foods, how the body uses and stores energy, and how to keep all those procedures working at best possible levels.

Determining just where in the education system that such a class would fit is another matter. Members of the educational system will perhaps tell you that it simply isn’t a matter of concern for the school system, that it is a topic best addressed at home.

But how can it be addressed at home, if the person at home has no knowledge about it. We don’t just acquire the knowledge needed for intelligent healthy eating with the birth of our children.

The fundamental food groups and what foods fall into each category is a topic that should be lightly addressed during the health classes taught at our middle schools. But what about the metabolic process of digesting those foods, the interaction of the food, the nutrients, and our energy needs?

Knowing how to differentiate between what foods will provide both energy, nutrients, and good taste is a learned knowledge. Do you suppose children would continue to stuff something in their mouth if we addressed the consumption of Twinkies in the same way we do dirt?