By Ciara Meyer
It feels like just yesterday that I was sitting in my seventh-grade Home and Careers class. I had just spent a day on an assignment that required documenting every food I ate, entering each item into a software that informed me of my exact caloric intake. I had measured even the smallest of snacks before consumption to ensure the accuracy of that caloric intake. After all my data was appropriately collected and entered, I looked through the color-coded report on my screen to assess the number of calories from protein, dairy, carbohydrates. While I scanned my computer screen I questioned if my 3/4 cup of Cheez-Its was what pushed me over my goal. Then, I moved on to the final step of my assignment: creating an ideal day of eating. A day of food with a calorie count set to ensure I did not gain a single pound or consume a milligram over my recommended sodium. After submitting my work, my teacher assessed my meals to see if they were up to par.
At the time, I knew the assignment was absurd, but I still paid close attention to the fact that my calorie count was in the yellow, my sodium was in the red, and I ate double the appropriate carbohydrates. I was hyper-aware of my food intake over the next few days. My fellow students also had uncomfortable relationships with this Home and Careers assignment. I remember overhearing a fellow student asking if she could shift her caloric intake target because her doctor had told her that she needed to gain weight. She seemed a bit nervous, almost unsure if gaining a few pounds was allowed in Home and Careers. I mentioned to my teacher that I thought the assignment was inappropriate for a group of eating-disorder-prone middle school students, but no changes were made to our required work. In fairness, I doubt she developed the assignment. I imagine it was simply a part of the curriculum. After all, the Department of Agriculture even promoted the software we used, Super Tracker, until the app was discontinued in 2018.
I do not care whether my seventh-grade teacher or the US government is to blame for creating such a convoluted assignment. What I care about is the impact such assignments can have. Teaching middle schoolers to hyper-fixate on the exact quantity of food entering their bodies is not just a waste of time, it does severe damage. According to a study conducted by Dr. Mariel Messer at Deakin University, adults who have used calorie-tracking apps reported higher levels of thinness and muscularity-oriented disordered eating than non-users. Telling a class of middle school students that calorie-counting is a way to live a healthier lifestyle pushes them towards eating issues as adults.
Some students who enter middle school already engage in unhealthy dieting behaviors that involve closely monitoring their food intake, even at the expense of their health and well-being. According to the National Association of Anorexia Nervosa and Associated Disorders (ANAD), this sect of students with eating issues is substantial. ANAD reports that 46% of 9-11-year-olds are “sometimes” or “very often” on diets and 35-57% of adolescent girls engage in crash dieting, fasting, self-induced vomiting diet pills, or laxatives. Calorie counting is adding fuel to the fire of eating issues for these students. A study conducted by Dr. Ann Haynos and Dr. Christina Roberto proved that calorie counting easily triggered women with eating disorders. When menus with calorie counts were shown to anorexic or bulimic women, they ordered foods with significantly lower calories than they had when the menus did not display such information.
Ending programs that worsen students’ relationships with food is a crucial first step, but it is not sufficient to simply end these assignments. Given that middle school students are already likely to be engaging in unhealthy eating practices, we must stop framing food as the enemy and switch to actively portraying food as a friend. This type of curriculum, one orientated at eating disorder prevention, has been proven successful. Preventative Medicine reported on a study of an eating disorder prevention program called MaiStep that concluded that universal prevention of eating disorders in students under the age of 15 was possible. Students who went through the MaiStep program had reduced body image avoidance and improved interoceptive awareness compared to their peers. Middle school Home and Careers class is the perfect time to introduce these programs, as, according to Johns Hopkins Medicine, the most common age of onset for eating disorders is between 12 and 25.
Arguments that call for maintaining calorie counting programming to decrease childhood obesity are, while perhaps well-meaning, lacking in a factual basis. According to Time, there are numerous reasons calorie counting is ineffective for weight loss. A major issue is that reported calorie counts are often inaccurate. Additionally, apps that claim to determine how many calories one should eat to maintain, gain, or lose weight often miscalculate users’ basal metabolic rates and thus display inaccurate caloric goals. Calorie counting is undoubtedly linked with eating disorders, and there is a profound lack of evidence proving that it helps prevent obesity. Thus, there is no compelling reason to keep it in school curriculums.
In my seventh grade Home and Careers class, I could have improved my relationship with food through body-positive programming or simply by learning fun recipes. Instead, strict adherence to a caloric goal was encouraged. Even though Maple Avenue seventh grade students did not receive the same assignment in 2022 as I did in 2017, they still were encouraged to track the calories of each recipe they followed in class. We must ask ourselves what lessons we want to pass on to Saratoga students. If our goal is promoting anorexia, we can continue with our calorie counting assignments, but if we want our students to be happier and healthier, we need a different curriculum.