New Club Helps Students Put the Brakes on Poor Food Choices
A new “fan” club with a traffic-safety theme is helping HISD middle-school students to make better food choices at meals and snack times.
The Minute Maid Food and Nutrition (F.A.N.) Club is the brainchild of Minute Maid Manager of Strategic Partnerships Fred Arnold, who teamed up with the Baylor College of Medicine last fall to address the number-one health crisis in young people: obesity.
Students in the Citizen Schools program at HISD's Jane Long and Sharpstown Middle Schools participated in the ten-week program, becoming experts at identifying green (eat freely), yellow (eat sparingly), and red (eat infrequently) “food zones,” in order to better navigate tempting food-choice “intersections.”
As a part of the program, the students monitored their weekly eating habits, charted weight gains and losses, and analyzed the nutritional content of fast food establishments’ offerings to learn how to make healthier choices.
Experts from the Baylor College of Medicine taught the weekly lessons and collected data from three control groups: students participating in an exercise program, students receiving nutritional counseling, and students who had neither. The data confirmed that both nutrition and exercise are critical components of maintaining a healthy lifestyle.
“Minute Maid is focused on battling childhood obesity by encouraging kids to lead healthier, more active lifestyles,” said Arnold. “Working with Citizen Schools this past semester has helped us to design an effective and sustainable nutrition program for middle-school children.”
The Houston Citizen Schools program launched in 2005 and currently serves approximately 500 students each semester.
Next year, the F.A.N. Club will expand to include students at Henry Grady Middle School.
