Impact On Learning
Research indicates that improving the awareness of nutritious meal choices and establishing long-term habits of healthy eating has a positive effect on a cognitive and spatial memory capacity, potentially increasing a student's potential to process and retain academic information.
Some organizations have begun working with teachers, policymakers, and managed food service contractors to mandate improved nutritional content and increased nutritional resources in school cafeterias from primary to university level institutions. Health and nutrition have been proven to have close links with overall educational success. Better nourished children often perform significantly better in school, partly because they enter school earlier but mostly because of greater learning productivity per year of schooling. There is limited research available that directly links a student's Grade Point Average (G.P.A.) to their overall nutritional health. Additional substantive data are needed to prove that overall intellectual health is closely linked to a person's diet, rather than just another correlation fallacy.
Better nutrition has been shown to have an impact on both cognitive and spatial memory performance; a study showed those with higher blood sugar levels performed better on certain memory tests. In another study, those who consumed yogurt performed better on thinking tasks when compared to those who consumed caffeine free diet soda or confections. Nutritional deficiencies have been shown to have a negative effect on learning behavior in mice as far back as 1951."Better learning performance is associated with diet induced effects on learning and memory ability".
The "nutrition-learning nexus" demonstrates the correlation between diet and learning and has application in a higher education setting.
Nutritional education is an effective and workable model in a higher education setting. More "engaged" learning models that encompass nutrition is an idea that is picking up steam at all levels of the learning cycle.
Read more about this topic: Underfed, Effects, Psychological
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