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Your Energy Needs

Author(s): Nancy P. Moreno, PhD, Sonia Rahmati Clayton, PhD, Paula H. Cutler, BA, Martha S. Young, BFA, and Barbara Z. Tharp, MS.
Your Energy Needs

 
© Steve Kingsman.

  • Grades:
  • Length: 60 Minutes

Overview

Students estimate average daily baseline energy needs for different levels of activity.

This activity is from The Science of Food and Fitness Teacher's Guide, and was designed for students in grades 6–8. Lessons from the guide may be used with other grade levels as deemed appropriate.

Teacher Background

Energy fuels growth, movement and all the processes in every cell inside the body. It has many different forms and cannot be created or destroyed, only transformed from one form to another. Both light and heat are examples of energy.

Many students may have difficulty understanding energy and its measurement. One way to approach these concepts is to think of energy as the ability to make either a change or a movement. There are many ways of making a change or creating movement, and energy can have many forms. For example, when a person kicks a ball, the energy from the kick makes the ball move forward. Or in cooking, energy in the form of heat changes an egg white from a clear liquid to an opaque solid. Energy in food commonly is measured as calories.

The easiest way to describe calories is to introduce them as a unit of measure. Weight can be measured in kilograms or pounds; distance can be measured in meters or feet; and energy can be measured in calories. As shown in the "Energy Sources" activity, one calorie is the amount of energy necessary to raise the temperature of one milliliter of water by one degree Celsius. Usually, when we refer to calories in food, we actually are considering kilo­calories. One kilocalorie equals one thousand calories and usually is written in the capitalized form, “Calorie.”

In this activity, students will figure out how many Calories a typical teenager needs every day. Baseline Calorie needs (also called Basal Metabolic Rate, or BMR), can be estimated based on gender, age, height and weight. Each student also may calculate his or her own baseline Calorie needs (see Step 6).

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Funding

National Space Biomedical Research Institute

National Space Biomedical Research Institute

This work was supported by National Space Biomedical Research Institute through NASA cooperative agreement NCC 9-58.