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Biochem students take healthy eating practices to the classroom

Curtis Budden and Samantha Brenton test the nutrition knowledge with a St Peter's Elementary student.
Curtis Budden and Samantha Brenton test the nutrition knowledge with a St Peter's Elementary student.
Kelly Foss

Biochemistry students majoring in nutrition are taking their education where they think it is needed most – the elementary school classroom.

Fourth year nutrition students Curtis Budden, Samantha Brenton and Melanie Stenback, along with third year nutrition student Andrew Dalton, have co-founded a program called Healthy Kids, Healthy Futures. The program, currently in its first year, has partnered a pair of university students with each Grade 4 class in St. Peter’s Primary in Mount Pearl. The goal of which is to teach the students about Canada’s Food Guide and making wise decisions when it comes to food choices.

“We didn’t want the focus of the program to be on obesity,” said Mr. Budden. “In fact, we didn’t mention it at all because this is the age when many children start to develop body image issues and we didn’t want to have a negative influence. We found the children really appreciated what we were doing and some of them knew a lot about it already. It was great to see them so interested in nutrition and wanting to be healthy.”

The Biochemistry students developed the program in consultation with Eastern Health and the Eastern Regional School Board. It purposely covers all areas of nutrition and healthy eating required in the Grade 4 curriculum. As someone who has always had an interest in childhood obesity, Mr. Budden had been looking to put the principles he and his classmates have learned in the classroom to good use.

“We’re learning more and more about nutrition all the time,” he said. “Unfortunately, there’s no work time in our program, so we don’t have any way of applying what we’ve learned. So it’s good for us and it also provides a useful service to the community.”

Mr. Budden approached a few of his fellow classmates in the third and fourth years of the program to help him develop and trial run the program.

“We wanted to keep the number of volunteers low this year because we wanted to start small as we worked on developing the program,” he said. “Hopefully next year the current third years, who will be running the program will have all the training materials and the experience needed to make it grow.”

Currently the group does not have any sources of funding, so program needs have come from their own pockets. They have applied for funding inside the university and hope they’ll get the support needed to expand the program in future years.

“We’d love to be able to reach out to more than one school,” said Mr. Budden.  “In the next five years I’d like to see the group cover all schools in the St. John’s area. Many of our students come from outside of the city, so ideally they can even reach schools in their own communities during breaks.”

May 7, 2008

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