Larry Ferlazzos Best...

The Best Nutrition and Food Safety Sites

A number of Web tools related to food nutrition and safety have opened for business" in the past year. I thought it might be useful to both my students and others to create a The Best" list related to the topic. You also can find links to most of these sites -- and more -- on my Web site under Health.

Here are my picks -- not in order of preference -- for The Best Sites For Learning About Nutrition and Food Safety.

Breaking News English has a lesson, including audio support for the text, titled Life Near Fast Food Restaurants Unhealthy.

Calorie King has a fairly accessible database on the nutritional content of many different kinds of food. This one would require some pre-teaching on what nutrition labels mean, though.

Fatburgr provides basic nutritional information on menus from popular fast food restaurants in a very simple and accessible interface.

The University of California-Davis has developed some wonderfully entertaining, informative, and accessible music videos about food safety issues. Theyre closed-captioned, and most, if not all, are not sung very fast.

Heres a slideshow called How Many Calories in a Thanksgiving Dinner? Not only does the site show the different foods that compose a typical Thanksgiving dinner, it also shares the calorie content of each food.

Eat, Drink, and Be Wary is the name of an interactive site from the Sun-Sentinel newspaper in Florida that shows images and descriptions of various holiday foods. If you click a food, youll then see how much exercise you have to do in order to work off" the calories in that food.

Food Fur is a fun game in which players have to select which foods are important to eat every day and which should not be eaten very often. Its good for nutrition education and vocabulary acquisition. Its definitely accessible to English Language Learners of all levels. The same site also has another healthy food game called Juice Jumble.

Stadium Nutrition from Aetna is an interactive exercise in which you create a meal youd eat at a baseball stadium and are then told its nutritional content.

Make Your Calories Count is a good tutorial from the Food and Drug Administration. It demonstrates how to read nutrition labels on food products. This site probably is accessible to Early Intermediate English Language Learners.

The Lunch-o-Matic game from PBS has players pick foods that help provide a healthy lunch. The site uses both text and audio.

The great Learning Edge computer-based paper" has an audio and text article called Men Dont Eat Vegetables. Another article from The Learning Edge is called Eat Less Meat.

Healthy Eating is a song from the British Council.

Get On The Right Track To Healthy Eating is a simple e-book with audio support.

Fantastic Food Challenge is a healthy food game from Michigan State University.

The Incredible Adventures of the Amazing Food Detective comes from Kaiser Permanente Health.

Healthy Roads Media has some great Web-based nutrition multimedia tools. You just have to scroll down until you reach the Nutrition section.

The Top 100 Foods to Improve Productivity is an interactive site from the British newspaper The Guardian.

The Food Pyramid is a good animated movie from BrainPOP, Jr., though you have to subscribe in order to view it.

Good Guide, which Ive posted about previously, rates products on health, environmental and social performance. Theyve recently added food items to the items they review. (You can read more about it at this Webware post.). Their ratings are a little different from the other sites on this list, and might be worth a look.

Still Tasty tells you how long different foods will stay safe to eat and whats the best way to store them. Its more appropriate for Intermediate ELLs.

Mission Nutrition is yet another healthy food game. This one is from Kids Health.

Buy Better Groceries is an interactive graphic from the Washington Post that lets you choose a category from a variety of grocery sections. Then, you choose brand names from that product category. Youre then shown the nutritional values of your choices, and you can compare those products with other options. Then you can fill-up a virtual grocery cart with your purchases" and see the total nutritional information for everything youve bought."

My Pyramid Blast-Off Game is a fun way for students to learn about the Food Pyramid. Its accessible to Intermediate ELLs.

CBS News has an impressive interactive on Diet and Nutrition.

Two Foods lets you easily compare the nutritional content of any two foods. My Foodapedia is a similar site.

Why Americans Are Fat is an infographic that explains why knowing about nutrition is critical for students.

Fizzys Lunch Lab from PBS is designed to help kids learn healthy food habits. Most of the text on the site is provided with audio support.

The Nutrition Caf at the Pacific Science Center has some neat activities.

Doles Superkids also has a bunch of neat activities and games. You might need to click the low-bandwidth version" -- and that seemed fine to me.

Food Champs has a lot of activities related to food vocabulary and nutrition -- at different levels. Most, if not all, of the site is accessible to English Language Learners.

Guess The Calories is another online nutrition game.

Dining Decisions is yet another healthy food game.

Play Unmuddle The Meals.

Start Making Choices has some good interactive guides on nutrition, as does Nutrition Explorations.

If you found this article useful, you might want to check out Larrys entire Best Of series, or consider subscribing to his free blog.

Larry Ferlazzo
Education World®
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04/23/2010