Nutrition education in Physical Education : More than teaching students to eat vegetables?

With the background of the complexity about food and nutrition in today’s society the purpose of this study is to investigate how high school students in Sweden describes their experience of nutrition education in physical education. The study focuses on how the students talk about food and nutrition and the approaches to health that are made visible within different subjects.The study was made with a qualitative method and consisted of eleven semi-structured interviews. The respondents were students from two different Swedish high schools who all had completed the course PE1. Data were collected and categorized using a step-based model which created four main themes. These were then analyzed using a patogenic and salutogenic approach on health and Britta Tedin Jakobssons didactic operationalization of Aaron Antonovsky’s theory Sense of coherence.The results suggest that education about nutrition in PE gets minimal lesson time. The content was characterized by a pathogenic, physiological approach with a focus on food and eating habits which was good for the human body. The students experienced the content relevant and important in relation to the PE subject and wanted more education about nutrition. There was however almost no description of the content that included social and psychological approaches in relation to food. Such approaches would be important within a salutogenic approach and the SOC theory. When the students talked about food and eating habits without connection to the PE subject, they showed that it was more than just eating healthy food for the body. For the majority of the students, nutrition was part of a complex project with an aim of minimizing anxiety associated with what unhealthy food and sedentary did to the body.The conclusion of the investigation was that the students felt a kind of sense of coherence within the nutrition education. But it was relatively clear that they were talking and caught in a traditional health discourse which is common in discussions about PE. Thus, the results arouse questions if it actually is that sense of coherence some students experienced that is desirable in the subject, or if the teacher instead should open up new perspectives and visions about nutrition for the students, a kind of salutogenic approach on food. This is of importance if the nutrition education should lead to a different sense of coherence. One that makes students experience health in relation to food