NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Preschool teachers scored low on a nutrition knowledge quiz and seemed to have unhealthy eating habits themselves, researchers found in a small study.

"Kids are with these teachers 6 to 8 hours a day, five days a week," lead author Shreela Sharma told Reuters Health. "Asking a child to make healthy choices when there are none in the environment he's in, that's not going to happen."

The federally funded Head Start program - which has been in the news following President Barack Obama's pledge for preschool funding - provides daily child care for children from low income families across the U.S. The program has served tens of millions of children since 1965.

Sharma and her colleagues asked 173 teachers at Head Start centers in Harris County, Texas five questions including "Which food group should be consumed most?" and "How many servings of fruits and vegetables should you eat each day?"

Ninety-seven percent of the teachers answered three or fewer of the questions correctly, according to results in the Journal of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics.

A quarter of the teachers had not eaten fruit the previous day, but half had eaten french fries. Almost half had drank soda the previous day.

Healthy eating habits are especially important for children from low income families, who are hit harder by the obesity epidemic, according to Sharma, who studies nutrition at the University of Texas School of Public Health in Houston. A 2011 study found that 25 percent of preschoolers who attend Head Start were obese, compared to a national average for 2 to 5 year old kids of 9 percent.

OTHER PRESCHOOLS WORSE?

Head Start, which requires teachers to have college degrees, is probably a bit ahead of other preschool programs in the country, which makes these results even more startling, Dianne Stanton Ward, a professor of nutrition at the University of North Carolina Gillings School of Public Health in Chapel Hill, told Reuters Health.

Head Start teachers are expected to introduce children to food groups as well as numbers and letters, but nutrition is not mandatory in teacher training, according to Sharma.

Link:
Head Start teachers behind on nutrition: study