Foodplay Production

Worcester County elementary school students learn healthy eating and exercise habits through national theater production

Dr. Pascucci, Pediatrician at the Atlantic Health Center, with FOODPLAY team at Most Blessed Sacrament in Berlin. FOODPLAY was brought to Worcester County's public schools by Atlantic General Hospital and Health System.

In 2010 and 2011, the Emmy Award-winning national FOODPLAY production was brought to Worcester County elementary schools to teach children about the importance of health diet and exercise through a fun-filled, attention-grabbing stage performance.

Students at all five of Worcester County’s public elementary schools – Pocomoke, Snow Hill, Buckingham, Showell and Ocean City – as well as Most Blessed Sacrament participated in the program solely sponsored by Atlantic General Hospital.

While FOODPLAY makes good eating great fun, its messages are very serious.

Childhood obesity has become the nation’s No. 1 health epidemic, with rates doubling among elementary school children and tripling among adolescents in the last 25 years. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, if current eating and exercise habits don’t improve, one out of two African American and Latino children, and one out of three Caucasian children will develop diabetes.

FOODPLAY comes to the rescue, helping empower kids with the skills they need to make their choices healthy ones. Foodplay Productions was founded in 1982 by Barbara Storper, MS, RD, a national leader in children’s nutrition. According to Storper, today’s kids face a very difficult and confusing food environment, with the average child seeing over 10,000 food commercials on TV each year, with the majority promoting junk food products.

Today, the average American child drinks more than 600 cans of soda and consumes more than 150 pounds of sugar each year. Less than one percent of the national’s youth are meeting their daily nutritional requirements, with intakes of fruits and vegetables far lower than what’s recommended.

As the FOODPLAY story unfolds, children learn how to see through TV commercials, decipher food labels, and make sense of today’s confusing fast food marketplace. Kids witness the ten teaspoons of sugar found in a can of cola, and the effects of soda on a dinosaur’s tooth in the old “soak in a Coke” routine.

For a video about Food Play and its effectiveness in getting the message across about healthy eating visit, http://www.foodplay.com/news/home.html#new1