The most visceral lessons are often the most effective. One can preach healthy eating habits to children all day long and have a minimal impact.
Or, you can do as Melanie Konarik, nutrition services director in the Spring (TX) ISD does: Take the rat by the tail!
Konarik has been making the case for healthy meal habits using lab rats…literally. She also constructs visual aids from test tubes, filling them with fat, sugar and salt to demonstrate the amount of those components in various foods.
The test tubes are powerful evidence of not-so-obvious differences: e.g., some contrast fat in a popular fast food burger vs. a school meal burger. But the rats are the big attraction.
Some are fed a healthy “school lunch diet” and others a “junk food” diet, dramatically illustrating the effects of unhealthy foods.
At the district middle school each year, Konarik purchases four three-week-old white research rats, an age at which they are weaned and can be handled.
Then two are fed a “healthy” diet of school lunch items (pureed in a blender) and the other two get “junk food”—candy, chips, crackers, decarbonated sugared soft drinks (decarbonated because rats can’t handle the carbonation).
The results speak for themselves. In four weeks, the rats—all male—should reach puberty, but only the ones fed healthy diets do. The others lag (“This really disturbs the boys, especially,” Konarik observes).
“The students really get into it. They name each one, weigh them each day and write reports describing them as they change. And the changes are dramatic.”
The rats getting a healthy school lunch diet grow into vigorous, active animals with plump middles. Their junk food brothers “get cranky, their eyes bulge from sodium and they stop grooming themselves,” Konarik says. “Their skin yellows, their tails become scaly and they get hyper from soft drink caffeine.”
“They get really upset at what happens,” she adds, and soon begin begging her to stop the experiment and feed the unhealthy rats better food. (And, yes, once the lesson has been instilled, the unhealthy rats are fed healthier food and “revive”).
Konarik restricts her program to one middle school because it is the only one with a teacher willing to take care of the rats (and even take them home on weekends because kids sometimes sabotage the experiment by feeding the rats healthy food on the sly).
The rats are also a hit at PTA meetings, where students give presentations describing the experiment. “It conveys the healthy eating message better than just about anything else we do,” Konarik says.
