Nutrition Classes and Clinics

The nutrition class, also known as the nutrition clinic, helped undernourished children to achieve and maintain good health through a combination of routine medical examination and care, supplemental feeding, instruction in foods and nutrition, and social work. Along with other public health nutrition initiatives developed during the Progressive Era, such as school meal programs, anthropometric assessment of nutritional health, and extension work in foods and nutrition, nutrition classes were a response to public and professional concern about malnutrition in the first decades of the twentieth century.