The beavers have been working on their Safety, Cook and Health and Fitness badges. This week, we found out what makes a balanced diet. Each lodge discussed one of the 5 food types and let the rest of the colony know about it.
- Carbohydrates give you energy, calcium and B vitamins (found in pasta, rice and potatoes)
- Protein – help the body grow and repair itself (found in meat, fish and eggs)
- Dairy products – keep our bones and teeth healthy (found in milk, yoghurt and cheese)
- Fruit and vegetables – full of health-giving vitamins, antioxidants and fibre – that keep us feeling full and our digestive systems healthy – plus they’re low in calories (fresh, frozen, tinned, dried and juices)
- Fats and sugars – it’s important not to have too many foods from this group as they give us a lot of energy from calories but not much nutrition (butter, cooking oils, salad dressings, chocolate, crisps, sugary soft drinks, sweets, jam, cream, cakes, pudding, biscuits and pastries). All the things we love!!
Then, we put a large selection of slips of paper with different food products on them on a table and each beaver had to choose one that was from their food type. They all did surprisingly well and it is clear to us that the beavers have been very well brought up – a big tick for the beaver parents!
Lastly, we wondered what effect activity would have on our heart rates. Our hypothesis was that our heart rates would rise with the level of activity we undertook. So we put it to the test. We decided to test our resting heart rates, then our heart rates after some gentle exercise and the after some vigorous exercise.
The first barrier to proving or disproving our hypothesis was that several of the beavers appeared not to have a heart beat in either their necks or their wrists! Luckily, we eventually discovered that they were all human after all.
A lively time
A moments of extreme quiet
We are not 100% sure that our testing will stand the test of a rigorous peer-review process but these were some of the results:
We decided not to publish the remaining results because, to be quite frank, some of them were a little ridiculous!
Up the Mighty Beavers!!