Archive: September 2007

Eating Smart

The road to better health begins with a FEAST

by Lisa Gnass and Jessica Schaub

Obesity in children is a growing concern. We all know that fast food and vending machines offering sugary beverages and candy bars, all readily available to our youth, just add to the problem. That’s why, for the second year in a row, the Junior League of Lansing (JLL) and the Greater Lansing Food Bank are choosing to be part of the solution.

The two organizations are taking a leading role in educating second-grade students in the Lansing School District through their Food Education and Story Time program, or FEAST. Students walk away from the experience with an armful of books, facts about what makes a snack healthy and a workbook of activities that reinforces each lesson.

But it’s not just about telling them what to eat: FEAST instead works to help kids understand how to make their own healthy choices.

“One goal is to help students prepare an internal dialogue so they know what to do and say when less-than-healthy snacks are presented to them,” says Marcia Gresens, chair of FEAST.

“It’s a mark of success when we hear that students have asked their parents to not buy potato chips, instead grabbing the crunchy fruits and vegetables they have tasted and read about in the FEAST program.”

Want to be a snack-savvy parent? Take a lesson from FEAST’s coordinators and volunteers. They’ve found that one of the most effective keys to nutrition is to involve children in the kitchen.

Children love to help, they love to eat and they love to say, “Look what I can do!” And there are many other great ways to raise a happy, healthy child:

• Don’t have a snack cupboard. Instead, have a snack shelf in the refrigerator with washed fruits and bags of cut-up veggies (eliminating the temptation to eat packaged foods filled with preservatives and mystery ingredients).
• Offer plain yogurt and add fruit.
• Make sandwiches out of anything, for example cucumbers and cheese slices
• Core an apple, slice into donut-like disks, spread on peanut butter, cashew butter or cream cheese.
• Make a shredded salad: Use a cheese grater to shred carrots, cabbage and apple. Mix in raisins and yogurt.
• Dip it! Kids will eat almost anything if they can dip it in something. Dip fruit in yogurt, vegetables in hummus, or make your own vegetable dip with low-fat sour cream and onion soup mix.

JLL is an organization of women committed to promoting voluntarism, developing the potential of women and improving the community. JLL’s FEAST program is the result of an intensive selection process to determine the organization’s “Signature Project” for a three-year commitment of building better communities and helping at-risk women and children.

For more information about the FEAST program, contact the Junior League of Lansing at www.jllansing.org or 517.324.3734.