Teachers Want Gardening To Be Part Of The Curriculum: To Improve Students' Diet And Fight Obesity

Delegates of the Association of Teachers and Lecturers are eyeing to add gardening to the school curriculum. Teaching gardening to young students can help fight the pervasive childhood obesity and improve students' diet.

Gardening For Primary School

According to The Independent, teachers requested the government to make gardening part of the primary school curriculum. This is to give the students proper learning about planting and growing food that can make them eat healthy.

Other benefits gardening has are teaching students to pick what they eat to fight childhood obesity. In fact, as per a teacher from Derbyshire named Natasha Bradley, said: "Some of our children now love eating things they would never have touched before - such as kale and spinach."

Obesity In Children

Cecilia Olley, from Swindon, on the other hand, noticed that childhood obesity has been growing in numbers and a lot of children need to lose weight. Also, according to research, as noted by Parent Herald, gardening can also develop students cooking skills and help the government's "cookery program."

Moreover, Medical Daily reported childhood obesity is already detected to kids under five years old and below. There are about 41 million obese children up to date, which grows by 10 million from 1990.

In fact, childhood obesity doubled in numbers for the past 30 years in the U.S. alone. Aside from the known reasons of childhood obesity, the foremost cause of the condition is the parents' often fail to see that their children are having weight problem.

Fighting Childhood Obesity

Hence, if the parents are incapable to distinguish their children's weight issues, doctors must interfere to check if the child is getting to overweight. Also, the obesity testing in hospitals and clinics must be improved to fight childhood obesity.

The researchers claimed checking children's BMI might be the efficient move to avoid obesity at an early age. "It's not currently recommended to measure BMI in children under the age of 2, but we say it should be because we now know it predicts obesity risk later," Dr. Allison Smego said.