About this course

What is healthy eating? Where does our food come from? What is sustainable eating? Food for Kids: Discovering Healthy Eating will help answer these questions and more.

Eating healthy foods every day helps you to grow, to have a healthy body and to feel well. As a child, you need different amounts of food and nutrients at different stages of growth. In this course, you will explore what is in food, how your body uses food to grow and be active, and how much you need to stay healthy. You will also use interesting examples from science to investigate tastes and flavours, how food is digested and growing and cooking food.

There is so much advertising for unhealthy food that it can be very hard to work out what to believe. This course will also teach you how to check health information, how to create your own healthy eating plans and contribute to a healthy planet. Join us in this three-week course to discover more about healthy eating.

What you'll learn

  • What is in food and how it is digested in the body
  • The healthy eating guidelines and how to identify healthy food and drink choices
  • How to understand food advertising and marketing, and how to create health messages
  • How healthy eating habits contribute to your wellbeing
  • About reducing food waste and being part of a healthy community.

Course Syllabus

Week 1 – What’s in Food?

  • Why do we need food?
  • How do we taste food?
  • What are nutrition-based guidelines?
  • What foods do we need more of, what do we need less of?
  • Are vitamins good for us?

Week 2 – Food Labels and Health Messages

  • Understanding advertising and slogans
  • How do we identify accurate information?
  • How do health messages influence decisions about food?
  • Food in my family, culture and community

Week 3 – Fun Food Science

  • Where does our food come from?
  • How do we grow our food?
  • How is food part of a healthy planet?
  • Healthy recipes for kids

Food for Kids: Discovering Healthy Eating


Meet the instructors

Professor Clare Collins

Professor Clare Collins

Clare is a Professor in Nutrition and Dietetics at the University of Newcastle in Australia. She loves nutrition and does a lot of research related to healthy eating to improve health and well-being. She has published over 250 research papers and supervised lots of budding researchers and research studies.

Associate Professor Tracy Burrows

Associate Professor Tracy Burrows

Tracy is an Associate Professor in Nutrition and Dietetics at the University of Newcastle in Australia. She is highly passionate about all things food, food behaviours, and communicating high quality, evidence-based information about diet and nutrition.

[317700,322437,317101]