Running head: CHOOSE MY PLATE

PPE 310: Health Literacy for Schools

Choose My Plate
Megan McDonald
Course: #22400 Gilbert
Mary Dean

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Introduction
Providing healthy menu options in school is important to ensure
that students can be successful. Students who lack proper nutrition
have trouble focusing in school. The United Sates Department of
Agriculture created a Supertracker to provide nutrition facts to
parents and/or student to promote healthy eating. It is the schools
responsibility to meet proper nutrition guidelines when providing
healthy meals for students. The National Standards for School Meals
and Dietary Guidelines for Americans made the specific requirements
that schools need to meet. These guidelines are aimed to improve

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health and nutrition in students who participate in school meals every
school day.
National Standards for School Meals
First Lady Michelle Obama recently improved the National Standards
for school meals to require schools to provide healthier meals for
students. The standards ensure that schools offer students both fruits
and vegetables every day of the week, increase their offerings of whole
grain-rich foods, only providing fat-free or low0fat milk, limiting calories
based on the age of children being served to ensure proper portion
size, and increase the focus on reducing the amounts of saturated fats
and sodium.
Canyon Rim Elementary meets the National Standards for
schools. This school does a phenomenal job at promoting healthy
eating. For breakfast, the students are provided with low-fat or fat free
milk, fruit options, whole grains, and daily meat. They provide students
with four lunch choices each day and 2 out of the 4 choices are healthy
options. The cafeteria provides a salad bar for students to choose from
and the workers remind the students to choose at least one thing from
the salad bar. Canyon Rim teachers work towards getting their
students to always choose the healthy options provided.
Canyon Rim Elementary is on a free-reduced policy. 3% of the
students at Canyon Rim receive free-reduced breakfast and lunch. The
Local School Wellness Policy requires that Canyon Rim includes goals

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for nutrition promotion and education, physical activity, and other
school-based activities that promote student wellness, meet nutritional
guidelines, increase involvement, inform and update the public, and
maintain wellness goals.
Dietary Guidelines for Americans
Dietary Guidelines for Americans provides recommendations to
keep Americans healthy. The key recommendations are that people
maintain calorie balance overtime to achieve and sustain a healthy
weight, and focus on consuming nutrient-dense foods and beverages.
To get the full benefit of improving health, individuals should carry out
the Dietary Guidelines recommendations in their entirety as part of an
overall healthy eating pattern (Dietary Guidelines, 2010).
A typical Canyon Rim daily school meal was entered into the
SuperTracker to review the nutrition and daily limits a student should
be eating each day. The breakfast and lunch combined did not exceed
the daily calorie limit, sugar limit, saturated fat limit, and sodium limit.
Fruit juice and whole fruit was the only food group that met the target.
Refined grains, vegetables, dairy, and protein foods did not meet the
target, which means that Canyon Rims meals do not meet the Dietary
Guidelines for Americans.
The Supertracker suggested that with the chosen intake of
food the student should be participating in 150 minutes of physical
activity a week. Canyon Rim only provides 45 minutes of physical

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activity a week. This school should provide students with more physical
activity to balance the diet provided.
Nutritional Improvements
To better meet the Dietary Guidelines for Americans there are
some nutritional improvements that need to be made at Canyon Rim
Elementary. Canyon Rim does not provide students with enough
vegetables in their daily meals. They should open up a salad bar that
consists of fresh vegetables for students to customize their own salad.
Instead of providing multiple fruit options they can substitute some of
the fruit for vegetables.
Also, Canyon Rim should give students protein bars as an option
to have on the side of their meals. This way they are getting their daily
amount of protein required. Canyon Rim should also limit students to
only having two drinks instead of three. One of the two drinks should
be water. Students do not need to be drinking three chocolate milks or
three fruit juices for their lunch. Having water will ensure that students
are properly hydrated before going out to recess.
Another suggestion for improving the students nutritional intake
would be to provide students with a checklist as they are picking out
their items. The checklist will consist of a vegetables, fruit, meat, dairy,
and grains. The students will have to make sure their meals are filled
with at least one item on their list. This way the students are becoming
responsible for their healthy eating habits.

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Reflection
As a future educator, it is important to be aware of the proper
nutritional intake students need in order for them to be successful in
school and in the future. Health and nutrition should be integrated in
the general curriculum to promote healthy eating habits. Health
education motivates students to improve there over all wellness by
reducing obesity, increasing their physical activity, preventing
diseases, and reducing risky behaviors. There are life-long benefits to
teachers teaching students the importance of living a healthy life style.
Teachers need to serve as positive role models and model healthy
behaviors in order to promote health education.
There are many different ways to incorporate health education
into the classroom. Specifically, I believe using the USDA
SuperTracker in the classroom could be beneficial for students to
learn about their daily nutritional intake. The teachers could require the
students to track their daily meals (breakfast, lunch, and dinner) for
two weeks. The students can be given time in class to do this or be
required to do it at home for homework. If the students do this at
home, it may get their parents involved, which would most likely
change their eating habits at home. Each day, the teacher could have
the students reflect on if they met their target goals. The students can
also reflect on how they can improve their eating for the next day. The
teacher should encourage the students to participate in physical

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activity daily, especially if they are exceeding calorie limits. If each
student records their daily meals on their food tracker and meets their
nutritional goals, the teacher will reward those students with a physical
activity break from class.

References
Dietary Guidelines for Americans. (2010, January). Retrieved March 14, 2016, from
http://health.gov/dietaryguidelines/2010/
Local School Wellness Policy Requirements. (2015). Team Nutrition. Retrieved March
14th, 2015, from http://www.fns.usda.gov/tn/local-school-wellness-policy
requirements

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Nutrition Standards in the National School Lunch and School Breakfast Programs.
(2012). Department of Agriculture Food and Nutrition Service, 77(17). Retrieved
March 14 2016, from http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/FR-2012-01-26/pdf/2012
1010.pdf
SuperTracker: My Foods. My Fitness. My Health. (n.d.). Retrieved March
14, 2016,

from https://www.supertracker.usda.gov/foodtracker.aspx