Friday, November 26, 2010

Fighting obesity at school and at home

This is a follow-on to Dan's previous post on nutrition.

You may know Jamie Oliver as the Naked Chef on the Food Channel. (It's not that the chef is naked, the food is...free of excess fat, sugar, salt, preservatives and other chemicals.) He has an excellent talk in which he discusses the seriousness of the obesity epidemic and a simple approach to a solution: teach children about food and have everyone learn to cook ten healthy, easy recipes...and then pass the recipes on.

http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/jamie_oliver.html

One of his slides is really good. It shows causes of death in the US and highlights the causes that are linked to diet in red. The little bar way down at the bottom of the graph is for homocide, which gets so much attention in the news. The vastly bigger red bars, diet-related causes of death, get far less attention.

What does this have to do with education? A large part of the problem is failing to understand just how our diet is actually killing us (see graph above) and what we can do about it. Education can fix that.

In the spirit of Jamie Oliver's suggestion that we share good recipes, what is a favorite recipe of yours that's delicious, inexpensive, healthful and easier than drive-through burgers or ordering a pizza?

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Keywords: Jamie Oliver, nutrition