Nuffield Home Economics: Nutrition

Nutrition was one of the four topics that featured as a separate area of study in the Nuffield Home Economics course for students aged 14–16. The course emphasised the influence of food choice on health. The authors appreciated that entrenched attitudes to food and feeding are as likely to influence dietary practice as reasoned argument so they suggested that theory must be capable of ready translation into habitual practice. Accordingly the approach to nutrition adopted for the course started with food habits, and then considered physiological needs for food and the influences that affect food choice. Prominence was given to food classifications and expressions of food composition which could readily be used when solving problems as various as planning a menu and taking a snap decision at a fast-food counter.

The Students’ Book and Teachers’ Guide were supplemented by a pack of photocopiable worksheets and assessment card masters. The worksheets provide further information on the scientific principles described in the text, and contain activities which demonstrate them.

The assessment cards offer the teacher a variety of tests and projects for each chapter and help towards effective assessment of students' performance. They were designed to be flexible in use and were intended for display on an overhead projector or to be duplicated either in part or in their entirety for a written test. The questions are varied and include objective questions, structured questions, and questions using mathematics. Each card includes suggestions for projects or course work investigations. Many of the questions have no one right answer.

Contents
Chapter 1. Why, where, and what do we eat?
Chapter 2. What is food?
Chapter 3. Animal, vegetable, and mineral
Chapter 4. Why eat?
Chapter 5. Why drink?
Chapter 6. Using food energy
Chapter 7. How much food energy do we need?
Chapter 8. Food energy: the balancing act
Chapter 9. Where there's life there's protein
Chapter 10. Calcium and vitamin D
Chapter 11. Iron and some B vitamins
Chapter 12. Potatoes, sailors, and vitamin C
Chapter 13. Carrots, eyes, and vitamin A
Chapter 14. Who's special?
Chapter 15. Lessons for the future