The Food Pyramid and a Healthy You.

The objective of this lesson is to introduce middle school students to nutrition through hands-on experiments using plant and food materials.  Middle school students learn to use an indicator to  visualize the nutrient starch in various foods such as cereals, breads, crackers, and noodles.  Second, the plants, as well as parts of plants, used to make these foods and their position in the food pyramid is discussed.  Students examine various imbibed corn seeds to see if all corn seeds contain the same amount of starch.  Middle school students can “see” the starchy endosperm in field and popcorn seeds while sweet corn seeds contain very little starch in their endosperm.   Students examine labels of processed foods and compare the quantities of corn starch and other corn products found in these foods.  Hands-on activities using Lego^TM blocks to represent glucose molecules enable students to visualize starch formation in plant tissues.  Starch digestion in plants and animals is visualized in a fun, hands-on experiment using starch-agar gels and iodine.  Math is incorporated into this lesson as students compare and compute the amount of sugars they consume when drinking various carbonated beverages and sports drinks.  Other blocks making up the food pyramid are discussed, and students identify what plants/plant parts are represented in these blocks.  Examples of vegetables and fruits are checked for the presence of starch, and students learn that starch is found in various quantities in both foods.  Bananas make an excellent example of a fruit that contains various amounts of starch, and students can better understand why very yellow bananas are sweeter than those that are still a bit green (as bananas ripen the starch is converted into sugar).  Students discuss the plants found in the ‘meat block’ and use iodine to check for the presence of starch in seeds from peanut, bean and  pea plants.  The ‘take home message”:  starch, like other important nutrients, is found in various quantities in many plants throughout the food pyramid, thus it is important for good nutrition to eat a well-balanced meal containing various examples of foods from all blocks in the food pyramid.