CAMP ZAMA, Japan — Plastic beans show what a portion size is, a body suit helps emulate obesity and a series of plastic boxes shows how much sugar is in a cola.

Students at Zama American High School held a health fair on Wednesday with props from the Army Center for Health Promotion and Preventative Medicine, Pacific, to learn about health and nutrition.

“It’s a lot of health-based information … to make people aware about being more healthy,” said fair organizer Christine Geist, who teaches family and consumer science and health-care services.

About a month ago, her students selected projects for the fair and created displays using Internet research, interviews with local specialists and help from the preventative medicine experts at CHPPM-Pac.

The fair included a weight suit to give wearers a realistic feel for being overweight; plastic food that showed just how small a recommended portion of pasta is; an introduction to the new customizable Food and Drug Administration food pyramid; and a few gory details about sexually transmitted diseases, eating disorders and teen pregnancy.

The goal of the fair was to get students interested in a topic and allow them to share their findings.

“They not only internalized it for themselves but they’re teaching others,” Geist said.

The fair was open to Zama’s students, as well as students from John O. Arnn Elementary School at Sagamihara Housing Area and Shirley Lanham Elementary School at Naval Air Facility Atsugi.

“What makes it best is the kids are very proud of their projects,” Geist said.

Savannah Robinson, a ninth-grader from Atsugi, did a display on portion sizes using plastic models as examples. She was surprised that a serving of pasta is about the size of a make-up powder compact.

“Everyone is surprised by the pasta,” she said. The project was more fun than a research paper and taught her a lot, she added.

“A lot of times you’re unsure of what a serving size is,” she said. In her research she found serving sizes have tripled since the 1950s. Seeing the real sizes will stick with her, she said, “to help remember it now.”

Geist said the seventh-grade class created posters as part of the “Got Milk?” calcium campaign and eighth-graders made posters on nutrition labels. The rest of the grade levels created the projects.

The dental display, created with help from soldiers with Zama’s dental clinic, included “Mr. Gross Mouth,” a model set of teeth demonstrating the effects of oral tobacco use, and the boxes of sugar showing how bad orange soda can be.

Hannah Quick and Saaya Koseki, both seventh-graders from Atsugi, said seeing the sugar made them stop to think, even if they won’t swear off candy and cola altogether.

“I will watch what I eat now,” Quick said. “It’s amazing how much sugar there is in all stuff that we love.”