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March is National Nutrition Month. Recently, there has been much controversy about school lunches and their questionable nutrition value. In fact, many of the traditional school lunch items have been implicated in growing trend toward obesity in students and the inevitable relationship to increasing juvenile diabetes.

Some states have taken action to prohibit "junk foods" and substitute healthy choices for students. Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger signed legislation to ban some junk foods from California high schools, in an effort to stem child obesity.

"We are going to terminate obesity in California once and for all," the former bodybuilder and actor said. The new laws extend to high schools a ban on soft drinks already in place at primary schools. New limits on fat and sugar content have also been set for vending-machine snacks and food sold in school stores.

Activity: Students will benefit from mini-research activities that help them to learn more about why they should be substituting nutritious foods for junk foods.

Click the Health and Human Body icon > Food, Drink & Nutrition link. Note the related Topics/subtopics listed. Assign different students one of these subtopics to research. For each subtopic create several essential questions for critical thinking to ensure that students are motivated to express their reasoned opinion on the subtopic rather than just a collection of facts. Here is an example using the subtopic of Dieting:

Students should use at least two articles from the results list to create their written report or presentation. Teachers should encourage oral reports of two minutes so that students can learn from each other's research, practice presentation skills and increase their effort because of the motivation of peer-review.

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