C. Everett Koop Quotes

It's incredible what happens when you explain to kids what good food is - they get so excited! They go home and tell their parents... and they're excited to cook the recipes themselves in class.

Cooking with your kids and engaging them in hands-on activities are two ways to begin to educate children about the healthy eating, and kick start the important task to help change how the younger generation looks at food and nutrition.

Proper school nutrition must be complemented by activities outside of the cafeteria. The decisions parents make to keep their kids healthy are critical in fighting this battle on the home front.

A lot of parents ask me how to get kids to eat more vegetables. The first thing I say is that it starts from the top.

I always did the cooking at home, and we always tried for balance. We've been vigilant about how and what our kids eat. For example, my son would just as soon go for the grapes as he would the chips... and the chips are baked.

I believe that parents need to make nutrition education a priority in their home environment. It's crucial for good health and longevity to instill in your children sound eating habits from an early age.

While having two biological parents at home is, the statistics tell us, best for children, a single-parent household is almost as good.

A few years ago, kids from poor areas in France were asked to draw items of food. For a chicken, they drew a drumstick. For a fish, they drew a fish stick. Those are extremes, but there is a lot that needs to be done to help children discover good food.

There is nothing unhealthy about educating youngsters about nutrition.

If your kids see what you eat, they will probably eat it, too. I'm not going to use the old-school policy of what my mother did and say to my kids, 'Well, if you are hungry enough, you will eat what I put on the table!' I think my kids have an understanding that if they see what their parents do, they should follow, too.

Our children's health and well-being are dependent on our commitment to promoting food access and good eating habits at home, at school and in the community.

It is vital that we provide North Dakota's children with nutritionally sound diets. That means ensuring that they are getting plenty of fresh fruits and vegetables, and are developing good eating habits for their future.

Not only do we have to change the food we eat... we have to educate people about what they can eat appropriately.

It starts in the home environment. If the parents eat bad? Those kids are going to eat bad. If they see their parents stopping at McDonald's or Pizza Hut, then that's what they're going to eat as well.

Jamie Oliver, quite rightly, was talking about trying to improve the diet of children in schools and improving school meals, but the net effect was the number of children eating school meals in many of these places didn't go up, it went down.

There are ways we can go do a better job of educating young moms and dads about the vital role they have as the child's first teacher. I think there are ways in which we can partner with local school districts and states to do a better job to provide nutrition options at school.

Every public school in the country should have a nutrition-education curriculum. We're creating a pilot program at my son's school. We are looking to create a replicable model that can help bring good nutrition to all children.

It's so important to that we go into the public schools and we feed all of the kids something that is really good for them.

If we are going to change our diets, we first have to relearn the art of eating, which is a question of psychology as much as nutrition. We have to find a way to want to eat what's good for us.

We're adults. We're the ones who should teach the kids what's good to eat. I don't think the government should ever regulate what we eat at home, but we're feeding them in school with tax dollars. Quite frankly, if my tax dollars are being spent to feed kids, I'd rather feed them better food.

People don't become obese overnight. Allowing our children to have treats in moderation - as in trick-or-treating - is one thing, but good nutrition involves discipline that must be learned and practiced on a daily basis.

As parents are usually working, they haven't time to teach children about cooking, and it's a wilderness. They should be given healthy recipes - some standbys so that when they leave home, they don't live on junk.

Very few parents give out healthy lunchboxes due to pressure from their children.

I knew nothing about nutrition until 1982. I had a big turnaround that year and never looked back.

It takes several doses of any veg before children like it, but once they do they'll like it for life. You wouldn't give up on a child who didn't want to learn to read. Learning to eat is every bit as important.