Most of us are aware of the obesity epidemic that is plaguing our youth. There are a whole host of reasons why this is. One reason is that our concept of what constitutes a portion of food has drastically changed. Food portions have gotten much larger, more than double in many cases, in the past 20 year. In this lesson we use actual data collected from the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute website to explore these changes in a spreadsheet (I use MS Excel) . Depending on the age and ability of your student this lesson, with it’s writing component, can take up to 3—45 minute class periods. It can be adopted to fit your time frame.

This lesson covers the following spreadsheet tasks:
Data entry, format font, format background color, Modify cell width, Formula (percent), Formula copy, and Creating column graph.

This lesson is designed assuming all students are in front of a computer, however it can be adopted to groups or whole class.