[quote=bearishgurl]Honestly, I think learning about taking something from each food group every day and how much energy expenditure it takes to lose a pound as well as balancing a checkbook and the study of the cost of carrying credit card debt (or a car loan) should be mandatory subjects in a high school curriculum.
These are life skills that would be of GREAT BENEFIT if mastered at this age and the vast majority of parents do not try to teach them. Why is this so? Because many parents don’t understand this subject matter themselves. And, even if they do, they are NOT leading their kids “by example” :=][/quote]
Agreed. I think it’d be a great class to have every child (with a dr’s approval) run for 30 minutes on a treadmill at a 7 min mile pace (or somewhere thereabouts) and then read off the calories burned. Then tour the room and look at how many calories are in each popular *single sized* junk food item–let’s say each kid would burn approximately 350 calories on that treatmill run. Then walk over to a large cheese pizza (which many teenagers will eat in its entirety in one sitting) and see that it contains 1500+ calories. Hm, that’s a lot of running to nullify that pizza. Then do a bag of doritos, supersized fries… compare with fresh carrots or low fat protein source.
See, Math, science, health and life skills all in one class! An educational bargain!
Let’s not even get into how much less you’d pay if you shopped for fresh food grown locally or the decrease in health expenses for treating the result of years of bad eating….
