Everything I know I learned in preschool

Abstract

Over the last twenty years, childhood overweight has become a growing epidemic. In 2006 it was estimated that 15% of children in America were overweight or obese, which is almost twice as many as in 1996. One issue in addressing this problem is the fact that nutrition education typically isn’t introduced to children until early adolescence and this late introduction of nutrition education may be missing a key audience in the battle against childhood obesity. The purpose of this study was to determine whether three- to five-year-old preschool children know about food groups and whether education increases that knowledge. Nutritional knowledge was assessed by a child food sort and data were analyzed using t-tests and ANOVAs. Children in this study were found to have a low to moderate level of understanding when it came to nutritional knowledge and this level of understanding did not increase with education.