Incarnate Word students teach elementary kids about brain health

Healthy food, healthy brain, healthy body.

That’s the “Triple H rule,” a message that Incarnate Word Academy senior Sneha Reddy hoped to deliver to Windsor Park Elementary students on Wednesday.

During the kids’ P.E. classes, Reddy and her brother, Pranai, a junior at Incarnate Word, gave presentations as part of iConquer Kids Brain Health. They co-founded the program to teach kids how to develop healthy brains through good nutrition, an active lifestyle and learning.

Reddy said she was inspired to start the group after writing a research paper last year about why mass shootings have increased in the past few years. She found that mental illness is widely associated with mass shootings.

Mental illness is “not really a very prominent issue that’s spoken about,” Reddy said. “I thought it would be really effective if me and my brother could somehow make a change with that starting with our own community.”

Reddy said she chose to target elementary school kids because, with their still-developing brains, they’re at a prime age to learn about developing healthy habits.

Since she was in seventh grade, Reddy has been a student ambassador for the It’s Your Life Foundation, a South Texas organization that promotes health education. Her program is a branch of the foundation’s existing iConquer initiative, which focuses on diabetes prevention.

The siblings kicked off an afternoon presentation by asking the fifth-graders gathered in the cafeteria to name either a favorite healthy snack or a fact about the brain. Students called out that they loved cucumbers, berries, mangoes, carrots. The human brain is fully developed by the time you’re 25, one student said.

Some kids gasped and others applauded when Reddy informed them that dark chocolate is packed with nutrients.

Reddy then played an animated video, “Wonderland of Fantasy,” that she and her brother co-wrote. The video began with a message about mental illness — one in four people is diagnosed with depression before age 18.

In the video, a genie who owns a theme park becomes depressed, and the theme park goes defunct. A group of friends bands together to find the genie’s various brain parts, which came detached: the brain stem, corpus callosum, cerebrum and cerebellum. The friends identify foods that are healthy for the brain; with their help, the genie, along with his theme park, is revived.

Experts say a poor diet and physical inactivity can increase the risk for depression, though treating depression through diet and exercise alone doesn’t work for everyone. Treatment options also include therapy and medication.

Misty Breneman, project coordinator for the It’s Your Life Foundation, also suggested that kids struggling with mental wellness talk to a school counselor.

After the video, the Reddys led the group in “brain games.” They asked the kids to make rolling motions with their arms, rotating one arm forward and the other backward at the same time. On the screen, they displayed the names of colors typed in random colors — for example, the word “green” in a red font — and challenged the students to recite the color of the word rather than the name of the color. 

Pranai held up a 16-ounce bottle of Sunkist and told the kids it contained 17 teaspoons of sugar; he held up a sandwich bag filled with sugar as a comparison. Water quenches thirst better than soda or Powerade, he told the students.

The siblings then fielded questions from the kids: Are carbonated drinks with low sugar better than soda? Are video games OK if they involve physical activity?

Daniel Galvan, a P.E. teacher at Windsor Park, said he was impressed by the Reddy siblings’ initiative.

“It’s really awesome because it’s what we’re teaching at our school — if they see a problem, they need to come up with a solution and an action plan,” Galvan said. “To see (the siblings) do that, talking about mental health, it helps these kids see an opportunity to do something like that.”

Vicky Camarillo covers education, immigration and other issues in South Texas and the rest of the Lone Star State. Support local journalism with a subscription to the Corpus Christi Caller-Times.

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