Celebrating National Nutrition Month®
North Texas Food Bank’s Nutrition Services team provides free nutrition and culinary education to neighbors.
Nutrition Education Specialist Quyen Pham teaches neighbors how to make a beet salad as part of a class about heart healthy eating at Local Good Center.
Robert admits he was more than a little skeptical when Nutrition Education Specialist Quyen Pham told him they were going to prepare a beet salad that would be healthy 그리고 tasty.
But after assisting Quyen in putting together the dish, which included mixed greens, a homemade salad dressing with an olive oil base, beets and dried cranberries, Robert said to his surprise that it was, “actually pretty good!”
He was one of about 14 neighbors who attended a recent North Texas Food Bank Healthy Hearts Cooking class hosted at Local Good Center in partnership with the American Heart Association.
Along with demonstrating how to create a nutritious dish, Quyen walked participants through 10 steps for improving their heart health as well as how to build a healthy meal using the USDA’s MyPlate guidelines that call for fruits and veggies to take up half of a plate while whole grains and protein make up the other half. Dairy is added on the side as a drink or snack, like yogurt.
“Nutrition is all about balance,” Quyen said, adding that not every meal has to perfectly resemble a MyPlate example as long as you strive for eating healthy the majority of the time. “It’s all about developing healthy habits for yourself.”
As Nutrition Education Specialists with the NTFB, Quyen, Ashton Hinckley, and Jamie Palefsky teach an average of 10 to 14 classes each month in the community, including at partner pantries, community organizations, schools and elsewhere. In partnership with Feeding Texas, the NTFB has provided free nutrition and culinary education like this for over 20 years. NTFB’s Nutrition Services team also includes Garden Specialist Karen Gilboux.
Each March, the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics celebrates National Nutrition Month® to raise awareness of the healthy eating habits it works to help people make throughout the year.
Along with hosting classes, NTFB’s Nutrition Services team provides nutrition education materials, 조리법, virtual cooking and garden demo videos, and an interactive grocery store tour meant to equip people with practical information and useful money saving tips to make healthy choices.
Local Good Center’s Market is also an NTFB Nudge Pantry, where materials and recipe cards help encourage the selection of nutritious food.
Ashton also dedicated her graduate project to developing resources for college students facing hunger while Jamie spends part of her time on the NTFB’s Nudge Pantry initiative. Through this program, partner pantries are equipped with recipe cards, shelf tags and other subtle cues, or nudges, meant to help neighbors make healthier choices when selecting food.
Quyen says they work to make their classes interactive while also being educational so that students and neighbors are participating in positive and inclusive conversations about how to easily incorporate nutritious foods and healthful behaviors into their daily lives. At Local Good Center, which has a client choice-style pantry complete with Nudge Pantry resources , she shared simple tips for eating healthier, including cutting down on salt intake, eating fewer processed foods, rinsing canned veggies and fruits to remove added sugar and salt, and making your own salad dressing.
She says their hope is that neighbors go home with at least one thing they can apply in their daily lives. They want to make eating healthy on a budget accessible.
It’s also why Quyen ends each class asking participants if the recipe they just learned is one they could see themselves trying at home. For Robert, beets are not a pantry staple, but now, he says they just might become one. “This was really interesting,” he said.
For more information on Nutrition Services, check out all the available resources on NTFB’s website and subscribe to the bimonthly newsletter, Spade & Spoon, here.
Kathleen Petty is communications manager for the North Texas Food Bank.