Health Fair

We participated in the Trout Creek Health Fair last week.  I ran a session about nutrition, based on a website I found about "Breakfast Superheroes".  Ella helped with my research about calcium and non-dairy sources while Ivy independently made a fact sheet on why protein is important and how to get non-animal forms of it.  We are not militant vegetarians but I feel that "alternatives" are not generally well publicized in the Canada Food  Guide education that's usually taught.  The girls attended my session and helped set up, organize and take down.

During the half hour that I had each class we spent a bit of time on each food group and had an activity to go with each.  Of particular interest to me was the "breads and cereals".  We chose to focus on the sugar content of various breakfast (mostly) foods.  A volunteer came to the front to match the food with the corresponding package of sugar.  A can of pop was 11tsp and a commercial bran muffin was a whopping 10tsp - almost as much!  The daily recommended maximum (American Heart Association) is 7 tsp.  It's not in the Canada Food Guide of course because we can live just fine without added sugar.  The basic calculation to figure out tsp of sugar is grams per serving divided by 4 (technically 4.2).  We discussed this in detail only with the oldest kids, who were in grades 4 & 5.