ALBANY, New York – Sugarless Wednesday, a program of the New York State Dental Association (NYSDA), is being celebrated in dental offices, classrooms, school cafeterias and day care centers on Wednesday, February 28. The event, held in conjunction with the February observance of Children's Dental Health Month, is an effort to help children and teens become more aware of non-essential sugars in their diets and the impact that food choices have on their oral and overall health.

New to the program in 2007 will be the involvement of SchoolFood, the New York City Department of Education’s food service provider, resulting in outreach to more than 500,000 children in New York City elementary school dining rooms.

“Since its inception more than five years ago, this event has been integrated in cross-curricular subject areas,” said Dr. Steven Gounardes, a Brooklyn dentist and president of NYSDA. “Students have weighed the grams of sugar from their morning cereal in science lab, created food diaries for English, developed comparative bar graphs of the sugar content of foods for math, composed event-related theme songs in music class and decorated bulletin boards for health class and school cafeterias,” added Dr. Gounardes.

NYSDA is providing educators and participants with free Sugarless Wednesday “survivor” certificates. Contact NYSDA for more information, info@nysdental.org.

SOURCE: New York State Dental Association

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