2009, 2010, 2011 Grant Recipient: Neshaminy School District

Update: December, 2011

For the third year in a row, Pennsylvania's Neshaminy School District has been awarded a CWC grant. After successfully expanding its nutrition education curriculum with previous award funds, the district plans to use this year's $2,000 grant to produce school-wide commercials about nutrition, invite popular speakers to teach children about nutrition, take field trips to local farms and fresh food markets, and purchase a plant-growing lamp for the classroom herb garden.

Learn more about Neshaminy nutritional education curriculum at: http://www.consumerwellness.org/PR13.html

Update: August, 2011

For the second year in a row, the Neshaminy School District in Pennsylvania has been awarded a $1,000 grant that it will use to further expand its Nutrition: Fitness for Life program. Last year, the district had hoped to implement a system-wide series of nutrition commercials to broadcast to its 3,000 students, but it lacked necessary funding. With this year's grant, the district will now be able to air them as well as buy food and supplies for classes that will teach 200 children the science behind nutritional "superfoods".

After several years of trying, Neshaminy High School’s Family and Consumer Science Department finally got approval to offer a Nutrition course. The goal for this course is to encourage our teens to improve their own nutrition and that of their future family by making an educated behavioral change to healthful alternatives: foods that come from nature, not factories. In order for this to happen, students need to compare different foods based on nutritional value, cost, ease of preparation, and especially taste.

Because of budget cuts and the unexpected large enrollment, no funds were available to teach this course the way it was written: to combine nutrition and food science theory with practical collaborative healthful food preparation, taste testing, and lab experiments. Thank you, Consumer Wellness Center, for providing the funds to allow this course to proceed as anticipated. Without the grant funds, the essential food preparation, tasting, and experimentation component of this course would have been lost and students would not have had the same classroom experience. Here are some examples:

• A feature of this course was to research a Superfood each week. On Fridays, we would discuss the nutritional punch and the students would have a chance to taste the superfood. Some of the different foods sampled by Nutrition students were: berries, papaya, jicama, coconut, edamame, green tea, dark chocolate, walnuts, and wheat berries.
• Students also had the opportunity to use superfoods in a variety of recipes. There were six kitchen groups who each prepared a different recipe and the following day everyone had the chance to sample each. Some of the superfoods or recipes included: bruschetta, broccoli, black beans, humus, smoothies, spinach salad, guacamole, granola, protein bars, quinoa, kale chips, cranberries, pumpkin, apples, and whole wheat pizza.
• In addition, traditional recipes were altered to become more healthful by using whole-wheat flour, cutting the sugar and fat content, etc. and then compared to the original.
• Lastly, several food science experiments were conducted in the classroom. Students tested the electrolyte content in various sports drinks, prepared their own home-made sports drinks, and comparisons were made based on cost, nutrition, and taste. Iron was extracted and measured from various breakfast cereals. Foods were tested for their macronutrient content and mystery foods were identified. Plastic was made from the curd of milk by lowering the pH and denaturing the protein. Students even had the opportunity to make their own frozen yogurt from scratch.

Some other group activities the students enjoyed during their experience in this course were: researching different vitamins and creating brochures, designing posters to hang in the hallways promoting good nutrition, creating commercials for the morning news program, designing a product and planning an infomercial, and using various software programs to analyze their diets.

Any good educator with knowledge of biology, chemistry, and physiology can teach a course in Nutrition. In a normal classroom setting students “hear the facts” and the likelihood that any of them will take these facts to heart, particularly with the power of advertising in the food industry, and make a behavioral change in their own diets is slim. In my opinion, “hearing the facts” must be paired with practical application. Students need to prepare, compare, and sample healthful alternatives to their current diets. They need to learn first-hand that preparing and eating nutritionally dense foods/meals is an easy and pleasurable experience as well as being critical for good health and longevity.

Thank you once again for your support in providing funds for this Nutrition course so the students at Neshaminy high school could have such a solid learning experience.

Sincerely,

Kelly Macauley

Learn more about the CWC nutrition grant program at: http://www.consumerwellness.org/NutritionalGrantProgram.html