Purpose of the evaluation: What aspect of the program would you assess? How does this complement the larger group evaluation? (5 points)
Background: The group project focused on evaluating whether the environment in school lunchrooms employed environmental change strategies that encouraged healthy eating. These strategies involved using behavioral economics to improve meal selection. Group project evaluations would use surveys, focus groups and observation to evaluate the presence of Ravenswood City School District School lunchrooms strategies used for food labelling, nutrition education, portion sizing, taste expectations, smart pricing, suggestive selling, visibility, the presence of competing foods, positive communication by cafeteria
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Increasing fruit consumption in school lunchrooms could be as simple as offering smaller-sized pieces that children can easily hold, bite, and chew (T. Baranowski, 1999, N. Bonnhoff, 2002). This ties into the larger project of evaluating the environmental strategies the school employs to encourage healthy eating and observes if such a strategy actually increases the consumption of fruit at the school lunchrooms. Similar evaluations can be used to asses if vegetable, milk or whole grain consumption is increasing and this can help answer some of the larger scale issues around obesity in the Ravenswood City School District. Scaling up this type of evaluation can further investigate whether a bite size fruit portions or strategic serving of vegetables might improve fruit and vegetable consumption in other places, such as companies, hospitals, and senior living homes. It also offers opportunity for policy change in the way the myplate guidelines are presented to children and schools can take steps to make fruits and vegetables more enticing to children.
Evaluation question: What is your alternate evaluation trying to answer? Does this differ from your group evaluation question? (5 points)
The alternate evaluation trying to answer the question: Do children consume more fruit when it is cut into small pieces as compared to if it were offered to them whole? Smaller-sized fruit pieces should be appealing and easy to eat for smaller children and therefore
Obesity can often be the consequence of living in a household that instill unhealthy eating habits. Schools can be a positive influence on teens early in life so that obese teens can lead into their adult lives with healthier habits. With these healthier habits, they may likely have more energy to become positive influences in others lives to be healthy and be able to do more. If schools can make such an impact on students’ lives, they should try, even if they needed to sacrifice extra money or instructional time. In 2007, there was a study that only one fifth of high school students had eaten fruits and vegetables at least five times a day in a week (Wexler, 2010). While it is unreasonable to force someone to eat these foods, if they are regularly offered as part of school lunches, students may eat them if they have finished the rest of their lunch and are hungry. Schools should be encouraged to even add fruits and vegetables to vending machines for healthier options.
One of the most controversial issues today is the question of how to address childhood obesity. Because of the large proportion of meals that children, particularly low-income children, consume in schools, cafeteria food has been targeted by dietary reformers as in need of a major overhaul. However, while many different types of new school menus have been proposed, the extent to which healthier foods can be offered remains controversial. Opponents to reform state that children will not eat healthier lunches, and that changing the food that children eat will have minimal impact, since the children will either bring food from home or eat food at home that is more 'kid friendly.'
For many previous years, Anaheim High school has had a couple lunch system changes finally settling on two lunches, both being half an hour long. With both lunches only being half an hour long, for certain, more than one thousand students being in each, imagine the lunch lines! Making line to get your lunch takes already about fifteen minutes, half of a person’s time already, which leaves little time for a student to enjoy their so called meal and free time with friends.Based on other student’s experiences dealing with school lunch, one can rightfully assume that high schoolers would much rather hold in their hunger until after school rather than have the food being provided. There is not a single day that goes by in which a high schooler does not complain about the “worst than jail” food being served to them. This proposal will go into detail about why having an hour off-campus lunch can increase healthier eating habits between the undergraduates of Anahiem High School. In this layout, you will read about the issue of why we believe off- campus lunch would be a healthier choice for Anaheim High school students, you will also encounter our plan of how we intend to carry out this idea, what exactly needs to be done, with the help of who, and so on.
Authors Alice Waters and Katrina Heron, proposed an idea that more money being put into the food would help the poor nutrition that cheap food gives . This cheap and unhealthy food has shown its way over the last decades. The Center for Disease Control and Prevention mentions that childhood obesity has doubled in the last 30 years, and adolescent obesity has quadrupled. My idea, is that lunches could be five dollars a day. Instead of pizza, chicken sandwiches, and cheeseburgers; each day of the week can have a certain day where cultured food is served. For example; on Mondays, Italian food would be served, on Tuesdays, Chinese food would be served, etc. This is a much more appealing food option than the two dollar lunches students currently eat. This would also benefit the students because they would look forward to the certain day where their favorite food is served, while also being healthy. Another poll I created asked whether my idea of cultured food days would be better than the everyday pizza, chicken sandwich, and cheeseburgers. Ninety-nine percent of the students agreed that my idea was
The United States have been facing a problem of obesity for quite some time now. And no matter how far we dig into this problem, we will find many reasons for the cause. In today’s society, politicians are inclined to take this issue serious because it is now affecting our children on a large scale. According to the United States Department of Health and Human Services, 1 in 3 adolescents between the ages of 6 and 19 are overweight. Many believe this to be a problem of poor eating habits and in some cases the lack of healthy eating options. In the documentary Food Inc. it mentions schools choosing healthy lunch options provided by local farming. In this paper I will evaluate how Wisconsin public schools have adopted programs that will
A study by the USDA found that placing incentives on healthy purchases had a great effect on how much fruits and vegetables families purchased per month. For every $1.00 spent on fruits and vegetables families received $0.30, and after a year the USDA noticed these families were purchasing nutritious foods more often. The USDA has also updated the standards for meals prepared by schools, making serving nourishing foods a requirement. As a result of this update, the consumption of vegetables and fruits by students increased by 16% and 23%, respectively. The implantation of these programs did not a very long time and their cost was very affordable and reasonable. Food education is especially important when preventing obesity in food deserts because knowing is half the battle. Interventions such as school gardens allow kids to have a hands-on education while learning about nutrition. These garden are a cheap way to both feed and educate
America’s lunch program has been established ever since President Harry S. Truman signed the National School Lunch Act on June 4, 1946 in order to ensure the health of children. (Rafidi 1) Providing lunches for students is essential in order for them to receive the nutrition they need but if one think deeper about this, is the current lunch program really beneficial towards the youth that will soon shape the future? Just recently in 2010, First Lady Michelle Obama stepped up hoping to maintain the growing problem of childhood obesity by inspecting the food that was sold in schools. In a 60 years time frame, school lunch has become an issue that was once thought to help reduce malnutrition to food that may be harmful to teens’ body. This should
This value often fluctuates more than 60% from day to day, illustrating that a majority of individuals are not dependent on cafeteria food for lunches, but instead purchase them because they enjoy the food being served. Because they are often not recipients of free or reduced price meals these individuals are important to the cafeteria’s bottom line. If crowd-pleasing, sugary foods are displaced by healthier, less popular alternatives, lunch purchases will fall significantly, further increasing the cafeteria’s overall operating expenses. Requiring school meals to comply with sugar limiting standards would only exacerbate current budgetary conflicts, causing smaller proportions of the district’s already contracted funding to be available for spending on actual education. While some individuals may insist that increased spending on meals can be justified by its positive effects on the health of adolescents, once again in practice, these benefits are not as pronounced as one might
Calories, obesity, epidemic―these words flash through daily conversion like wildfire. The American public today is severely concerned with the nation’s growing health problem, as they should be. Recently, the nation’s school lunches have had major renovations due to the alarming increase in childhood obesity. The National School Lunch Program (NSLP) has set out to fix the problems concerning nutrition in school lunches. Because the National School Lunch Program is required to follow the most current version of the Dietary Guidelines for Americans (DGA), school lunches are undergoing massive reform at the cost of students.
Because children tend to choose foods that taste great but are not so healthy for their bodies, the problem of child obesity has been brought up. But despite this, many school districts deny the requests to lower serving portions and to add in more vegetables and fruits, because it would be too costly. (Reinburg) It’s true that improving school lunches won’t solve the problem but it has long been a part of the problem and taking a step forward is an improvement. (Reinburg)
Many kids around the world often play outside with each other; whether that be at a playground or in a back yard. Though, in America, the majority of young people own some type of electronic. Instead of burning calories playing outside, kids decide waste their energy playing games on their devices. According to the USA Today, “One of every three children in the United States is overweight or obese”(USA Today). With the population constantly growing, and the kids getting lazier and lazier, the numbers of obese children is only going to increase. The government can help America by changing kid’s diets. The only way the government can manage what kids consume is through school. Changing school’s lunch menus will be a great start, since many schools in the United States do not provide nutritious meals, In fact, the University of Washington asked a handful of middle schools and high schools to participate in a study. The study compared the meal standards before and after menu changes. The professors then calculated the meal standards using the meals’ adequacy ratio (MAR) and concluded, “The nutritional quality increased by nearly 30%, from a MAR of 58.7 before the Healthy Hunger-Free Kids Act to 75.6 after implementation”(Chen). The scientists achieved this drastic increase to the meals’ adequacy ratio just by providing a healthy variety of foods and reducing portion sizes.
In America, a country known for its obesity, over eating has become a big crisis. While this crisis is discussed at the national level, it is also a problem here at Liberty High School in Brentwood, California, where the students are affected due to the high calorie diet that is provided by the cafeteria. The consumption of these fatty foods on a daily basis is greatly affecting the student body and this has got to change. An effective solution to this complication is for the National School Lunch Program (NSLP) to supply foods that will meet and not exceed the nutritional needs that teenagers need to consume. Although the NSLP supplies the food, the cafeteria staff are the individuals that set up the food trays that the students
The mammoth task of completing any serious evaluative process requires teamwork, determination, and a sense of urgency. The hours of analyzing, reading, studying documents, collaborating, and meetings can drain the most ardent staff. In the case of DSU’s 2013 Year One Evaluation, a 28-person committee, two peer evaluators, the President, and clerical staff labored many hours to complete the necessary reports. The comprehensive evaluation involved many more persons.
Considering the well-recognized benefits of eating fruits and vegetables, it is perhaps a given that consumption of these foods should be encouraged at every stage of the life cycle. Because many health-related lifestyle habits are established during childhood, the school food environment appears to be a prime area of focus for this effort. However, despite the importance of establishing healthy eating habits in these environments, studies have shown that intake of fruits and vegetables is especially low among children (Guenther, Dodd, Reedy, & Krebs-Smith, 2006). A variety of strategies have been and continue to be used to increase childhood fruit and vegetable consumption in schools throughout the United States (and throughout the world,
Many people are being faced with an unstoppable flood of unhealthy eating, and the next generation of adults are at a far higher risk of being obese and unhealthy than ever before. Although this may be the case, it is possible to halt the spread of obesity as well as the amount of unhealthy food being consumed by people. By first encouraging students to eat healthier meals, it is possible to ensure that the next generation of adults will be much healthier than those now. Many schools offer a multitude of different foods during breakfast and lunch; however, these meals are not always healthy. By creating healthier fresh meals, it is possible to change a student’s diet on campus as well as improve their learning and education. Instead of offering a greased up tray of food that encourages unhealthiness, providing fresh fruits and vegetables will allow students to live healthier lives altogether. In order to improve the quality of all people's lives, we must first attempt to change the lives and diets of students. By focusing on students, we reduce the likelihood of future obesity epidemics, so as a society, we should look for healthier options for a student’s school lunch.