Join the Movement!


Give a small gift today. Strengthen fitness and nutrition by supporting family participation in physical activities and healthy eating.

Harvard researchers found that for every 1 hour of exercise, you can add 2 hours to life.



How many hours do you pledge to exercise each week?


Take the
Fitness & Nutrition
Parental
Involvement
Pledge!
5 Simple Steps to Success

Parents and caregivers can set a great example for the whole family by creating a healthy environment at home. Any combination of steps-making fruits and vegetables part of every meal, limiting treats, walking and playing, even shopping together—can add up to make a real difference in children’s lives and help build healthy habits for life.




Eat Your Way To An A?

 The Link Between Student Nutrition And Student Achievement
We all understand that eating right is an important aspect of keeping our children physically healthy, but many parents do not know that proper nutrition is strongly linked with academic achievement. Even fewer people know that poor nutrition is not only a problem for impoverished families – children of all socioeconomic levels can suffer from lower student achievement due to nutritional problems at home.
 


How Important Is Sleep To School Success?
A person needs eight hours of sleep to stay healthy and alert, right? Wrong. While adults can thrive on eight hours of sleep per night, children require much more time snoozing in order to accommodate their developing minds and bodies. Medical professionals suggest that children aged 7-12 sleep ten or eleven hours per night while teens aged 13-18 get nine to ten hours of sleep per night. Unfortunately, The National Sleep Foundations says that only 5 percent of high school students get eight hours of rest a night and all school students sleep an hour less at night then their parents did as children.  




Your Face Here!
Project Appleseed on Facebook
Soccer. Piano lessons. Dance classes. Boy Scouts. The school play. The vast majority of parents agree that these after-school activities enrich their children’s lives, but recent research shows that the benefits of high quality, structured extracurricular activities go far beyond the rewards of the activities themselves. The Harvard Family Research Project recently released research that once again confirmed that out-of-school time activities increase academic achievement, improve classroom conduct, and nurture lifelong work habits.

 

USDA nutrition guidelines on 'My Plate'


A huge improvement over the baffling MyPyramid icon that it replaces, MyPlate is as easy as pie to understand; its designers smartly saved the fine print about how to actually fill the wedge-shaped spots on the plate for the Web site, ChooseMyPlate.gov. MyPlate, like the Food Pyramids before it, is meant to convey the key messages of the Dietary Guidelines for Americans in a simple, consumer-friendly fashion.
America's Best School Lunches
Ask a group of school kids about "mystery meat" and they may have no idea what you're talking about, not if they're on the feeding end of national and local efforts to transform school lunch programs. A genuine movement is afoot at schools to create better, more nutritional meals for kids using produce from local farmers, and in many cases, from gardens the students help create and maintain themselves.
The President & First Lady on the
Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act
New Report Ranks U.S. Health by County
Where Do You Live?

A comprehensive survey of overall health county-by-county in the U.S. confirms a few things we already know to be true: being poor is bad for your health. So is having low education, not having a job and having less access to grocery stores and farmer's markets for fresh food.