Getting Healthy by Eating Healthy

Abstract

Effective meaningful lesson plans for Native American students are rare in K8 schools. When a comprehensive curriculum is available that is aligned to the standards, it is mostly generalized to the point where it is difficult to connect the resource materials directly to Native American students. Nutritional education and instructing students on healthy lifelong choices form the primary basis of the curriculum unit. The instruction and lessons should focus on family, home and community as it relates to plant-based diets and nutritional science as integrated with the personal interests of the students. Today, changes away from the more traditional diets of the middle of the 19th century and cheap low nutrition high-profit margin food has created many physical health problems for Native American communities. In “Getting Healthy by Eating Healthy”, the curriculum unit will simultaneously address standards and instruct meaningful topics including the possible alleviation of the diabetes epidemic within the community, learning the nutritional contents of foods, and making determinations of what are more healthy and less healthy foods. This unit will cover the relationship between diet, health, physical activity, and diseases in our molecular biology and in relation to nutritional science. Students will build nutritional knowledge and develop plant-based food ‘habits’ based on researched concepts within the fields of social science and psychology.