From: Practical Advice to Teachers.
Extract from: Lecture 14 Stuttgart, 5th September 1919

You will find that children, when they have not been spoilt in their very first years, have still, relatively speaking, very sound instincts. They have not acquired the craving to stuff themselves with sweets and so on. They still have certain sound instincts as regards to their food as of course does the animal because it is still very much dominated by its body. The animal, just because it is limited to its body, avoids what is harmful to it. The animal world is not likely to be overrun by any evil like the spread of alcoholic consumption in the human world. The spread of evils such as alcohol is due to the fact that man is so much a spiritual being that he can become independent of his bodily nature. For physical nature, in its reasonableness, is never tempted to become alcoholic. Comparatively sound food instincts are active in the first years at school. These cease in the last years of life in the interests of human development. When puberty comes upon the individual he loses his food instincts; he must find in his reason a substitute for his earlier instincts. That is why you can still catch the last manifestation of the food and health instincts of the growing being in the last years of the lower school.

Later, you can no longer find an inner feeling for the right care of food and health. That is why particularly the last years of the lower school should include instruction in nutrition and the care of personal health. Object lessons can reinforce the fantasy or the imagination quite considerably. Put before the children three different substances...any substance which is composed primarily of starch or sugar, a substance composed primarily of fat, and a substance composed primarily of protein. The child knows these, but remind him that the human body owes its activities primarily to these three constituents. From this explain to him in his last years in the lower school the secrets of nutrition. Then on every aspect of nutrition and breathing connected with the care of personal health. You will gain an enormous amount in your education and teaching if you undertake this instruction precisely in these years. At this stage you are just in time to catch the last instinctive manifestations of the health and food instincts. That is why you can teach the child about nutrition and health at this age without making him egoistic for the rest of his life. It is still natural to him to satisfy instinctively the conditions of health and nutrition. They still strike a chord in his natural life and so do not make him egoistic. If children are not taught about these things in these years they will have to inform themselves later from books or other people. What is learnt later, after puberty, regarding nutrition and health makes people egoistic. It cannot but produce egoism. If you read about nutrition is physiology, if you read rules about the care of health, the very nature of this information makes you more egoistic than you were before. This egoism will continually proceed from a rationalized knowledge of how to take personal care of oneself, has to be combated by morality...But the human being is less exposed to the danger of egoism in later life if he is instructed in nutrition and health in the last years of the lower school. It is then natural to him.

*"Nutrition and Stimulants" by Rudolf Steiner published by Biodynamic Farming and Gardening Association (1991)

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