Students Learn about Portion Sizes

04/14/2006

By JAMIE STENGLE  / Associated Press

With a tennis ball and a yo-yo as props, first-grade teacher Kristy Brooks helped her class understand the correct portion sizes for vegetables.

"About how many yo-yos do you think would fit on this potato?" she asked during the nutrition lesson, prompting students to measure the potatoes against the yo-yos.

Brooks also used a colorful state-issued booklet called "A Serving of Fun," which is among the recent measures Texas has taken to combat childhood obesity. The state also has issued stricter guidelines for school lunches in recent years.

"To get a change in lifestyle, you've got to start young," said Texas Department of Agriculture spokeswoman Beverly Boyd.

The booklets targeting first- and fourth-graders went out to about 7,300 schools across Texas this spring, reaching about 662,000 students, And it was so popular that the department plans to send them to second- and third-graders in May, she said.

In a world were food is regularly "super-sized" and restaurants serve oversized portions, experts say giving young children a perspective on portion size is important.

More than twice as many children and almost three times as many teens are overweight now compared to 1980, according American Heart Association. Being overweight increases the risk for health problems including diabetes, high blood pressure, sleep apnea and high cholesterol.

At Irving's Lee Britain Elementary School, where Brooks teaches, administrators made the booklet part of an entire week of nutritional education in which teachers focused on a certain food group each day.

The week opened with a group of teachers called "The Salad Sisters" singing a catchy tune at an assembly: "Salad is good. Salad is smart. We're the Salad Sisters and we're speaking from the heart."

"I think (portion size) is something they really don't know a whole lot about," said Brooks, who was back in her classroom, but still dressed as lettuce with a green dress and tissue headdress for her role as a "Salad Sister." "I don't think portions and serving size have ever been explained to them."

Brooks did so by showing that a half a cup of vegetables or vegetable juice is equal to one vegetable serving, about the size of yo-yo. And a cup of leafy green vegetables is equal to one serving, about the size of a tennis ball.

In West Texas, Janie Peek of the Texas Cooperative Extension in Nolan County has used the booklets to help teach kindergartners to fifth-graders about portion size during programs she gives at schools on nutrition.

Students are often surprised to learn correct portion sizes, she said. They'll often discover, for instance, that they are eating two to three times the intended serving size for breakfast cereal, she said.

In Brooks' class, the kids tested out their new knowledge with snacks of sweet potatoes and carrots with salad dressing. Brooks tells the students that 12 baby carrots will count for two servings from the vegetable group, a tip that can be found in the booklet, available in both English and Spanish.

One student in the bilingual class begins counting his carrots diligently: "Uno, dos, tres, quatro, cinco, seis."

"Remember, if you're getting more carrots you need to count them out because that's another serving," Brooks reminds the class.

Elizabeth Schaub, dietitian and diabetes educator with Baylor Regional Medical Center at Plano, says "there definitely is portion-distortion."

"I spend 90 percent of my day talking about portions," said Schaub, who added that in the last 20 years portions that people are served have grown enormously.

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