Seeing results
Shao Chunyan, a health educator, said the school plans to assign sports homework during the winter vacation this month. Students will be required to complete a number of daily exercises such as sit-ups and rope skipping, "so we can ensure that students exercise regularly and maintain a healthy lifestyle at home," she said.
To make the campus more supportive of the Nutrition School project, the school has also held plays on nutrition and lectures by nutritionists, and has imparted health tips to students.
The changes are obvious. Fan Hongyu can hardly recognize some of her ninth graders when looking at their old pictures given the dramatic changes in their appearance over the past three years.
One of the boys told her that he was 1.73 meters tall and weighed 90 kilograms in the seventh grade. Now he is 1.78 meters tall and weighs 70 kg.
Since the implementation of the project, the rate of undernutrition among students at the pilot school has dropped by 0.5 percentage points, and the overweight rate and obesity rate dropped by 0.5 and 1.7 percentage points, respectively.
In 2017, the pilot project expanded to seven other districts and counties of seven provincial-level regions including Shandong and Sichuan.
The campaign has brought changes not only to the students but also their parents.
Lyu Yanqiu, mother of seventh grader Zhang Tengyue, said that when she heard of "nutrition education" for the very first time, she thought the program was focused on "appetite" because the two Chinese words are homophones.
After a visit to the school canteen and dining with the students, she said she understands the importance of food nutrition and safety and the need to apply the lessons at home.
Gao Shan, deputy director of the education committee of Shunyi district, noted that tackling students' health-related problems requires concerted efforts by schools, families and society as a whole.
