What size is your meal?

At Wanganui High School, we created a survey for year 9 and 10 students.
We chose four classes, which totalled 107 students.
The classes we chose were one mid-band and one enrichment form class for both nine and ten year levels.
With our surveys we wanted to discover how many students are educated about portion sizes and what their eating habits are.
We compared the two questions that stood out the most; they were asking if they thought they had had enough education about what foods they should be eating and the portion sizes they believe they should be served.
Almost all students believed they knew enough about food and nutrition to lead a healthy lifestyle (97 out of 107 students).
After this question we then asked them to label a dinner plate to see if they had enough knowledge to correctly put fruit and vegetables, meat products and carbohydrates in the appropriate sections on the dinner plate.
Shockingly only 30 students over both year groups answered this question correctly.
The data from the surveys showed us that students believe that their eating habits are healthy and nutritional. So are children and essentially their families being provided with enough education on this subject?
We believe many people are unaware of what damage they could be doing to themselves with over-consumption of certain foods, especially in today's world with the high fat and sugar products that are readily available to both children and adults.
Our aim was to change the mind-set of children before they reach an age where what they eat becomes into a habit, as recurring meals with the incorrect portion sizes of non-nutritious products will start to become new "normal" for them, but what they learn at school will not help change their eating habits unless the people around them change too.
The major concern we have is the growing sizes of portions that have steadily developed over the past 20 years and led to them nearly doubling in size without us even noticing.
This is one of the major factors that has led to excessive numbers of people suffering from diseases such as obesity, diabetes and heart problems.
Fast food chains have been one of the major implementers of this change when they ask us if we would like to turn our meals into a combo, upsize from a medium to a large or "Would you like fries with that?"