Nutrition 101: Choose Life!

Nutrition 101: Choose Life! , published by Growing Healthy Homes, is a Health and Nutrition course for all ages. It is a full-color book that covers the major systems of the human body, many health issues and their causes, and foods that are good for and bad for the body. Nutrition 101 is a wonderful blending of anatomy, physiology, and nutrition. It is packed with hands-on activities, healthy recipes that reinforce the lessons in each chapter, wonderful illustrations, and information that is detailed enough for a thorough high school level human anatomy, physiology, and nutrition course. The book is newly published and contains many of the latest findings on nutrition. There is a thorough appendix that includes information about the food pyramid, buying the best fresh produce (a full-color chart that covers about 70 fruits and vegetables), food safety precautions, vitamin charts, cooking with whole grains, and much much more! Every chapter concludes with activity suggestions for both elementary and secondary students and a healthy recipe that includes foods that correspond with the chapter.

Making healthy potato salad with flaxseed oil

The short video on the Growing Healthy Homes site gives a great introduction to the course.

The book is 448 pages long, which gives you an idea of how thorough it is. I would LOVE to own the printed book. I felt that it would be too expensive to print the e-book from my computer, so we are using the course by reading it from the computer. Emily is making her own notebook with notes from each chapter, illustrations, photos, activities, and recipes. I did print some of the appendices to keep in a three-ring-binder and am printing the recipes and some of the illustrations for Emily to use in her notebook.

THOUGHTS:

I love this course! It is well written, very thorough, and colorful. It is, however, quite difficult for a fourth grader and much of the information is over Emily’s head. Although it does include adaptations for different ages, I think middle schoolers and up would gain the maximum benefit from from the course. We completed the first unit (Nervous System) and will be doing one more unit (Digestive System) this year. Then we'll pick it up again next year when Emily will be able to dig a bit more deeply into the in-depth information the book provides.

Nutrition 101: Choose Life is available on CD-rom ($79.95) or an a printed book version ($99). Read more reviews of Nutrition 101 by the TOS Homeschool Crew.