Clinic’s shopping trips spice up nutrition advice
It was after she moved to Washington state from Texas five years ago that Sheila Flax noticed her son was gaining weight.
Down south, they lived on half an acre of land, enough space for a young boy to ride his bike and romp about.
But in Seattle’s Central Area where they live now, space is tighter. The nearby park feels more like a dog park, Flax said. A divorced mother raising two children, she also finds food costs more here, too.
On a recent Saturday morning, Flax and her son, D’andre Broussard, 12, were among about 20 mothers and children following two nutritionists around a Rainier Avenue South Safeway store in a program called Shop Around, learning how to select healthful foods that are easy on the household budget.
Flax believes “it’s far more expensive to eat and be healthy. … A lot of sports and things like the gym cost money. “If you want the better, leaner cuts of meat, organic, chemical-free food, you may pay twice as much.”
Shop Around, open to clients of the Odessa Brown Children’s Clinic in the Central Area, is so named because it focuses on the whole, natural foods located along the perimeter of a store - the meats, the dairy products, fruits and vegetables.
It’s part of Odessa Brown’s Fit 4 You program that, among other things, identifies overweight patients - or those in danger of becoming so - and educates them and their families about grocery shopping, cooking and nutrition.”We all recognize obesity as a huge problem people are facing,” said Odessa Brown nutritionist Linda Murtfeldt. “We’re trying to find things to make life easier and better for the low-income people who come here.”
A recent study by the University of Washington’s underscores why such a program might be useful to the clinic’s patients. It links the potential for obesity with ZIP codes, showing a slightly higher rate of obesity for many of the areas where the clinic’s clients live.
For Justin Seymour, 13, the Shop Around on this Saturday morning was a way to learn how to eat more healthfully to lose weight.
Justin, who considers himself something of a chef - claiming he’s been cooking since he was 3, volunteered to mix the ingredients for a bean dip that was served as a snack at the end of the tour.
“I cook just about anything - hamburgers,” the eighth-grader said with confidence. “I used to cook pot roast, steaks. … ”
His mother looked at him sideways: “When?” she asked. They both remembered: It was when she helped him.
Odessa Brown nutritionist Linda Murtfeldt said she focused this Shop Around on snacking to help children - many of whose parents work out of the home - make wise decisions about snacks and other foods they prepare for themselves.
“Parents are so busy and strapped for time, the kids are often fending for themselves - making things like ramen noodles or having big bags of chips,” she said.
As they walked around the store, Murtfeldt and nutritionist Jess Adlin, with Live Well in Bellevue, discussed the different food groups, explained what the food-guide pyramid is and told the kids they can make a healthful sandwich using most of the items from that guide: vegetables, meat, dairy, breads, fats, fruits.
They talked about the importance of reading labels - looking for the fat, sodium, and fiber content of the foods they buy. The fiber found naturally in fruits and vegetables, Adlin said, is lost in fruit juices. “Err on the side of more fiber.”
The nutritionists talked about the differences between processed foods, which tend to have more fat and sodium added, and nonprocessed foods. Cook your own seafood instead of buying breaded fish, such as fish sticks, they urged.
“Something like marshmallow is so processed it can’t even be identified as a food anymore. That’s what you want to stay away from,” Adlin said.
Murtfeldt and Adlin said that if parents must buy canned fruit, they should look for the ones packed in fruit juice rather than in syrup.
Justin’s mother, Shawona Wiley, said she wanted to get a better idea of the kinds of foods she should be serving her children. “My daughter is almost 18 and I want her to learn, ‘this is how you eat to lose weight,’ ” Wiley said.
“My doctor has already told me that I’m not eating right and both the children need to lose weight.”
Lornet Turnbull: 206-464-2420 or lturnbull@seattletimes.com