How Food Affects Your Body and Mind

In this B1 ESL lesson, students explore how food affects mood and health. They learn vocabulary for food, energy, and feelings and practice the zero and first conditionals.

Warm-up:

Students answer a few questions about their eating habits. Next, they learn useful phrases to describe how food makes them feel and use them to talk about common foods and drinks. Then, they put foods into groups depending on the kind of energy they give.

Video:

Students watch a TED-Ed video titled “How the food you eat affects your gut.” After watching the video, they answer questions about it and match words from the video with their meanings.

Exercises:

Students complete sentences with words and phrases such as crave, skip, and stay hydrated. They then complete a word family chart with nouns and adjectives. Finally, they choose the correct words to complete common food collocations.

Grammar:

Students learn how to use the zero conditional for general truths and the first conditional for possible future results. They then match the beginnings and endings of zero conditional sentences and complete first conditional sentences with the correct form of the verbs.

Reading:

Learners read a text about how food affects our mood. Afterward, they answer questions about the text.

Discussion:

Students describe a graph showing how energy changes during the day and discuss a few questions about food and mood. Finally, they act out a role-play between a patient and a nutritionist.