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Kids Teaching Kids Cookbook unites Medical City Heart, Greater Dallas Restaurant Association, Frisco ISD and Genghis Grill for Children's Health and Childhood Obesity Prevention
As national figures continue to call dramatic attention to the American problem of childhood obesity, four strong North Texas brands involved in health care, culinary education, and the restaurant business have joined together to provide real-life answers and solutions to the challenges parents face in ensuring that their children consume a healthy diet in today's hectic daily family life.
Medical City Heart, Greater Dallas Restaurant Association, Frisco ISD and Genghis Grill have come together to produce KIDS Teaching KIDS, a cookbook that features snacks for children that both meet the criteria of nutritionists as heart healthy, and also connect with children's imaginations to ensure that the food will be eaten and enjoyed again and again, facilitating a real and vital lifestyle change.
According to Medical City and national health care studies, in the past 20 years the percentage of children in the United States who are overweight or obese has grown exponentially, from 5 to 16 percent. And medical experts hold that the impact of childhood obesity is severe. Medical conditions resulting from overweight and obese children include high blood pressure, high cholesterol and type 2 diabetes.
The October 30, 2009 issue of The Kiplinger Letter reports that obese kids "see doctors twice as often as others and go to hospitals three times as often. That comes to an extra $2,000 a year for each obese youngster. Plus their parents take off more time to care for them." (Washington, D.C., 2009 Oct. 30. Forecasts for Management Decisionmaking. The Kiplinger Letter.)
In 2008, Medical City Heart, the Frisco ISD Career and Technology Education (CTE) Center, and the Greater Dallas Restaurant Association (GDRA) collaborated to develop a unique program. The Culinary Arts program students (11th and 12th grade high school students) were challenged to create healthy and flavorful snacks that a 4th or 5th grader could prepare at home. Medical City Heart evaluated the snacks for nutritional value. Fifth-graders from Shawnee Trail Elementary in Frisco sampled the snacks and rated each entry for flavor, nutrition and presentation.
Medical City Heart, Frisco ISD and GDRA then took all of these students' work to a new level in 2009 with KIDS Teaching KIDS. In addition to the Culinary Arts student, graphics students of Frisco ISD produced the layout and design of the booklet. Also, Media Technology students from Frisco ISD joined the collaborative effort by creating a documentary about the process. In this collaboration, raising awareness of the problem and a solution for childhood obesity on a local level in North Texas began.
The KIDS Teaching KIDS cookbook and program has created a fun and healthy snack cookbook for all ages to enjoy. Kids will benefit from snacks that are edible arts-and-crafts, provide nutritional facts, and easy-to-make with common pantry items. The goal of the booklet is to introduce healthy food choices that kids will enjoy and influence future chefs to consider healthy and nutritious ingredients when preparing recipes.
Following the guidelines set by Medical City Heart nutritionists and that are health care industry standard, each recipe features the following criteria:
· 200 calories or less
· Less than 7 grams of fat
· Less than 2 grams of saturated fat
· Less than 10 grams of sugar
KIDS Teaching KIDS recipes include Berry Fun; Bread and Butter Sliders with favorite ingredients like pepperoni; Peanut Butter Krispies; and Nanawich. The recipes all feature children's favorite flavors, with recipe names that present each snack as fun and appealing to children. Food items are also used in decorative ways to entice children.
The Frisco ISD students who developed the recipes were trained in the FS Prep program sponsored by Greater Dallas Restaurant Association. Beyond the training of the culinary students, the GDRA will help advocate similar programs involving high school culinary students, to help other school districts implement similar campaigns. The GDRA gives $80,000-plus each year to accomplished high school students pursuing culinary education at the college level.
"This cookbook is uniquely all about kids. The involvements of the schools and students of all ages really helps inspire an incredible grassroots image of the family cookbook," said Ryan Eason, manager of Medical City Heart's Restaurant Program for heart-healthy menu designations and Greater Dallas Restaurant Association board member and leader of the campaign. "Our goal is to let this spread like healthy wildfire of good thinking about children's nutrition and well-being."
"Along with generating awareness of the concerns and risks of childhood obesity, we want parents and families to understand that there are solutions to keeping their children healthy if they take action," continued Eason. "It's really about equipping the parents to help become more aware of what their children are consuming and providing them with direct and healthy parental control to be more fit."
Genghis Grill will support the production of the cookbooks as a corporate sponsor of KIDS Teaching KIDS.
For information about KIDS Teaching KIDS and to obtain a copy of the cookbook, contact Ryan Eason at Medical City Heart at
This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
, 972-566-7944.
For more information on the Greater Dallas Restaurant Association, its programs to build good business for the industry, and all of its culinary education and scholarship programs, visit www.gdra.org.
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Texas Comptroller’s office. 