University of Missouri Program: Coaches Missouri Families to Make Healthy Food Choices

Online, August 10, 2011 (Newswire.com) - Being more active and eating healthier food is one of the important factors that every family must uphold in their lifestyle. However, this is not an easy task for most families, especially thos with limited resources and knowledge.

Experts are aware that Missouri's obesity rate is too high and to address this issue, University of Missouri launches 2 extension programs that will teach Columbia Missouri families on how to make healthier food choices that will generally improve the quality of their lives. The 1st plan that University of Missouri planned to deal with this issue is by teaching families to eat nourishing foods and promote more physical activity in their lifestyle.

Family Nutrition Program or FNP now provides education about basic food nutrition to small-income adults and teens all throughout Columbia, Missouri. This program mainly focuses in teaching students, especially high school students and adults by adding it in their curriculum in school, cooking classes and even social marketing campaigns. This curriculum features Show-Me Nutrition, a series of programs for pre-k up to 8th grade, Food From the Farm, another program that teaches kindergartners about local farms and their fresh produced products, and Kids in the Kitchen, a program that coaches youth how to start growing their own vegetables and how to cook them.

It is essential that parents and their children learn how to make healthier food choices. This program targets low-income families as they may not know what other fresh food resourced resources they can have that our within their budget.

So far, participants of Family Nutrition Program share more ideas about healthier food choices for their families, keeping in mind the lectures taught to them such as reading the nutritional labels, choosing the proper food to eat, consuming more of the freshly made products and starting on a more physically active lifestyle.

There are already over 400,000 Columbia MO participants of the FNP programs. Coordinators and teachers of the program report seeing good changes among its students, choosing healthier food choices and becoming more physically active every day. Teachers also claim that they themselves have had better awareness about good nutrition.

The 2nd extension program of University of Missouri is the EFNEP or Expanded Food and Nutrition Education Program. This program focuses on women with kids and coaching them to gain better health and fitness for their families. Coach lessons provide managing their food budget by planning their grocery shopping, compare prices, reading the nutritional labels and preparing their food properly. Last year, EFNEP attained a total of 6,280 participants from the 53 counties of Columbia Missouri.

FNP and EFNEP are funded by the United States Department of Agriculture, facilitated by University of Missouri extension program and College of Human Environmental Sciences.

For more information, contact Samantha Craven (573) 882-9144 or email at slctw4@mail.mizzou.edu