Activity 1: Energy for Life Key Questions
This activity consists of a series of questions that could be used before, during or after the video. Alternatively, you can use the question sheet as a stand alone activity to review knowledge on the topic ‘Energy for Life’. Some of the questions can be used to stimulate discussion, others are better suited to a written answer, perhaps as homework. Some of the questions can be answered by watching the programme. Others will require reference materials such as books, CD-ROMs or the internet. Check the list of links for useful reference sources.

Activity 2: Striking a Balance
In this activity students estimate their energy intake and output. This can be done by referring to written sources. Students need information about the energy content of foods and the energy used during different activities. This information can be obtained from a variety of commercially available database files or via the internet from the Nutritional Analysis Tool:
http://www.aces.uiuc.edu/%7Efood-lab/energy/ec.html
http://www.nat.uiuc.edu/mainnat.html
Students must be encouraged to take a critical approach to the estimation involved. They are likely to find big differences between their estimated daily intake and output. Some of this can be accounted for by growth and heat loss, but most will be the result of inaccurate estimates of time, size of portion, etc.

Activity 3: High Fat, Low Fat?
This activity begins with the familiar practical technique for estimating the energy in food using a calorimeter. The temperature and mass of food measurements are entered in a spreadsheet that returns the energy content in kJ/100g.
A difference for low fat and high fat snacks should be noticed. However, students will find that their results are well below the figures given on packaging. They should be able to identify a number of sources of error. The section of the video showing a calorimeter could be shown when discussing these results.
Snack manufacturers print the amount of energy in 100g of snack on the pack. You can find out if low fat snacks have less energy in them.

Activity 4: How Much Food do you Need?
In this activity, students present data about energy needs as a bar chart. A spreadsheet could be used for this exercise and the activity could be extended to include further categories of data.