Houston, Texas nutritionist Melanie Konarik is fighting childhood obesity with an innovative approach that uses rats as examples.
If you watched Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution, you’ll remember he didn’t have much luck teaching kids about the evils of junk food by dressing up as a pea pod. Chances are, he would have broken through faster with a few pet rats.
Classroom pet rats aren’t a new trend, but using them to help students get hooked on healthy eating is. The idea comes from nutritionist Melanie Konarik of Houston, Texas, who introduces two pet rats to students in a classroom. Then, she asks the students to feed one of the rats junk food like chips and cookies, while the other rat is fed whole wheat pizza and other healthy dishes from the school cafeteria. After six weeks, the students have the chance to compare the two once-identical rats. The differences, students find, are striking.
“One of most phenomenal effects is that children saw dramatically what a good diet will do,” Konarik told the Houson Chronicle. The healthy-eating rat has a thicker, shinier coat, brighter eyes, a fitter form, and a more energetic personality than the rat that dines on junk food.
The results help the kids to understand the negative impact that junk food has on their own bodies, giving them the motivation to choose an apple instead of a Twinkie in the lunch line.
And while Konarik has focused her nutritional experiments around Houson to date, she’s been tapped as one of just four child nutritionists to help First Lady Michelle Obama’s anti-obesity campaign—so she’ll soon have the chance to help kids all around the country learn the truth about what kind of damage a diet of Coke and cookies will do.