I didn’t say “teach the kids to count calories”. I said “teach the kids to understand where the calories come from”. It needs to be a constructive conversation about, like you said, diversifying the food they eat and fuelling their bodies appropriately. Understanding things like when iced coffees have the calories of a cheeseburger.

There’s certainly a lot of psychological factors that go into deciding whether a client can handle calorie counting, but refusing to provide this information as part of a nutrition class enables charlatans to take advantage of ignorance, leading down a path of repeated failure.