About 20 Latino middle-school students from the Good Samaritan Community Center Summer Day Camp went to a farmers market on San Antonio’s West Side recently to learn about healthy food choices from medical students as part of a program at The University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio.

The program, Healthy Choices for Kids, for Latino children ages 10-14 from low-income families, doubles as an interprofessional elective course for university nursing and medical students. The students design a health curriculum and teach it at Good Samaritan Community Center and Krueger Middle School.

The student-designed curriculum teaches kids how to make healthy decisions regarding fitness, nutrition and healthy relationships, with the goal of reducing obesity, diabetes, violence and teen pregnancy.

The camp includes positive youth development, exercise, healthy lifestyle choices, goal setting, bullying/anger management and sexual abstinence.

At the farmers market, the children learned that eating more fresh fruits and vegetables can combat childhood obesity, and that fresh produce is available for a reasonable price in their area of town. The children were each given $2 to buy fruit.

“They purchased some fruit and then went back to the center and made healthy smoothies to demonstrate different ways fruits can be used in the diet,” said Dr. Adelita G. Cantu, assistant professor of chronic nursing care, who teaches the elective course with Dr. Ruth Berggren, director of the Center for Medical Humanities & Ethics at the Health Science Center.

Read more about the program here.