Childhood Obesity In America Essay

Julia Child once said, “No one is born a great cook, one learns by doing.” In this world today, a sad fact is that only about 60 percent of people can cook a meal. Now, imagine if as a child, you were taught how to chop a vegetable, or how to sauté a piece of chicken. Studies show that if you involve children at a young age to take charge in the kitchen they will developed life-long healthy eating habits, their self-esteem will rise, and their social skill will improve immensely. Personally, at the end of a long school day, one of my favorite ways to unwind is by slicing and dicing vegetables for dinner. The steady chop, chop, chop of a knife against the cutting board quiets my mind and soothes my soul. I've always seen cooking as a meditation with the promise of a good meal afterward. Now, I learned the skills that I have now in the kitchen from my grandmother. When I was a little girl, my grandmother would have me help her in the kitchen. She would pull up a stool to the side

Today, about one in three American kids and teens are overweight or obese; nearly triple the rate in 1963. Child obesity has quickly become one of the most serious health challenges of the 21st century. A few studies have assessed the effect of cooking activities on diet quality and health parameters. Involvement in cooking at home has been positively associated with fruit and vegetable intake and overall diet quality in children. Yet only about 2 percent of children eat healthy. Many studied have also showed that cooking involvement could increase the liking and the intake of self-prepared foods. In reality, children are just afraid of what they don’t know. But promoting exposure to novel foods in order to increase familiarity and creating positive experiences with novel foods has been shown to be an effective strategy for reducing food neophobia in