For the Mouths of Babes: Nutrition Literacy Outreach to a Child Care Center

Childhood obesity is at crisis levels in the United States. Risk factors for obesity can begin as early as infancy. Approximately 12 million children up to five years of age spend about 22.5 hours per week in child care centers where they receive a significant portion of their daily nutrition. Child care center personnel may not know how to select nutritious meal and snack choices. A health sciences librarian, a child care center director, and a dietitian designed an outreach program on nutrition that helped child care center teachers gain increased nutrition literacy. The teachers indicated that they gained increased personal understanding of formerly confusing nutrition issues (e.g., how to read a nutrition label and what defines a whole grain). Teachers were also able to identify aspects of web sites linked from MedlinePlus that indicated the sites served as reliable sources of health information.