I’ve written a great deal on nutrition and the health habits of society that only seem to be further entrenched by our schools. It’s a societal issue, and fixing it will take community effort and prioritization. It takes a village to raise a child, and right now our “villages” are surrounding schools with a gallery of fast food options, and even bringing their advertisements and offerings within school walls.
Some days it seems there is no stopping the trend towards worse health and more prevalent unhealthy habits. Each day there seems to be another headline warning us about the skyrocketing rate of heart disease, and yet these habits don’t seem to break.
In contrast to this, I’d like to offer an optimistic perspective. I got to sit down with Dr. Brandon Marcello, who believes we will soon see a trend towards better nutrition and respect for health in our schools. Dr. Marcello is the former Director of Sports Performance at Stanford, co-creator of Athlete’s Performance (now Exos), and was the Director of Performance for USA Softball’s 2006 and 2007 gold medal teams.
In this interview, he walks us through the Performance Dining system that he created at Stanford. It’s been a tremendous success, and would make a phenomenal model for dining and nutrition education. We also delve into more of the possibilities for education.
I hope this excites you for the possibilities of improving school dining and creating a better educational path for our future. Look out for my upcoming Essentialist interview series for much greater depth into training and life with Dr. Marcello.
