Hello thank you for listening to Fresh Focus, I’m Beth Blair and I’ll be your host today.

Today is not going to be your typical episode why you may ask because I decided to do something a little different and have our first ever Fresh Focus Rewind episode or a bonus episode if you will.

So let’s sit back and take a moment to turn back time on the clock a bit…..

ok so you all know I can’t exactly hop in my DeLorean and do that right now although it wouldn’t be awesome if I could….. so if anyone out there with a 1982 DeLorean with an extra flux capacitor let me know.

I wanted to take some time today to reflect….. a lot has happened since our very first episode of Fresh Focus.

If you are a brand new listener thank you so much for joining us…. if you have listened to every episode and all the series thank you out there for supporting us. We really appreciate it.

Our Marion VA Dietitians have worked so hard and we have covered multiple episodes on this podcast…. 8 series and counting and lots of plans for several more coming this year. All with our veterans in mind and promoting healthy eating and positive health outcomes.

Our very first series episodes 1-6 started out with healthy plate method and tips on how to build your own healthy plate. As I look back there really so many great episodes so if you are looking for some weight management tips check out series 4 about our VA MOVE program. If you want some more menu go back and check out episodes 1-6 on building a healthy plate.

Today I wanted to go back to series 5 as we celebrated National Nutrition Month with a short series with some episodes about diversifying your plate and focusing today on episode 26 with talking to the lead dietitians from our VA Healthy Teaching Kitchen program.

In March every year we celebrate National Nutrition month and this past year’s theme personalize your plate so we thought it would be fun and a good time to highlight this incredible program.

The healthy teaching kitchen program is all about teaching veterans how to personalize their own healthy plate with delicious healthy foods.

So Listen in with Robin and Melanya talking about the benefits of these classes for veterans and their families where they take nutrition education and deliver it in a way that anyone watching these cooking classes can really apply to their own lives.

It’s just a fun way to bridge that gap from just knowing what to eat to actually fixing those healthy foods to put on your plate.

Remember you can check out recipes and cooking videos on the VA Healthy teaching kitchen YouTube channel.

Have a great day everyone, again thank you all so much for listening and taking a trip back down memory lane with me. Stay tuned for more great episodes. Please be sure to subscribe to this podcast rate the series and leave a review.

Lindsey: Welcome back to another episode of the fresh focus podcast. Beth and I are so excited to be celebrating this year’s National Nutrition Month!

Beth: With this year’s theme of Personalize your plate, we are going to let you in on an amazing service our VA Registered Dietitians across the country provide with our Healthy Teaching Kitchen.

Lindsey: The healthy teaching kitchen is a big priority in our field at the VA and it is a national goal of ours for all our VA’s to improve your access to those classes whether it be in person or virtual.

Beth: And Lindsey and I went right to the source on this one and asked some expert Healthy Teaching Kitchen Dietitians to hop on today with us and share more about the benefits of this program and what you can learn from attending.
Thank you both so much for joining us! Can you tell us a little bit about yourselves, like where you are located and your role at the VA.

Robin: Yes, definitely thank you for having us, my name is Robin LaCroix, I’m a dietitian at the Wayfort Junction VA in Vermont, I worked here for 11 years as HPDP program manager and also dietitian with oncology outpatient and HTK. I’ve been coleading national VA HTK program for past 3 years and really find this aspect of my job very rewarding.

Melanya: My name is Melanya Souza, I am a dietitian the VA Medical Center in Gainesville, FL and I’ve been facilitating Cooking classes for Veterans in the North Florida/South Georgia region for 7 years. I joined Robin as co-lead of the national Healthy Teaching Kitchen program in 2018 and have been working with her to grow and expand the program, provide resources and support for other dietitians teaching HTK classes across the VA.

Lindsey: How exciting, what a great program! Our listeners might be hearing the word Healthy Teaching Kitchen for the first time. Robin, could you go into more detail about what that program is all about?

Robin: Sure, so this program provides experiential, think hands on and doing, nutrition education regarding food selection, grocery shopping and meal planning strategy and cooking with the goal of really increasing self-efficacy of the participants around these habits and supporting sustained behavior changes. Really what this means is that we take that education that is taught in the clinic or in MOVE or other nutrition classes and we put it in practice in their day to day meals. The program is primarily taught as a series of group classes, mainly in-person prior to Covid and now mainly virtually, but it also ranges from hands on to demonstration and now some sites are having people cook along while at their homes while we teach these virtual classes.

Beth: I heard you mention MOVE, I have been hearing that along in my MOVE classes and in my 1:1 sessions that some people do not really know where to start with cooking. Or they get super overwhelmed with finding recipes. What are some other benefits from attending a teaching kitchen class?

Melanya: it’s funny, I do hear that a lot from other dietitians and it can be overwhelming to figure out how to make the changes we want to in our own lives. we all know that just knowing something and doing it are two different things. I would say that’s one of the probably primary benefits of the HTK program that we take nutrition education and deliver it to our patients in a practical form that they can apply to their own lives and we try to make it as realistic as possible for them and bridge that gap from just knowing and actually doing.

Robin: another benefit we find is really helping people reconnect with the enjoyment of eating especially for people who have been on diets or kind of have had a restriction focused they can really be disconnected from how they enjoy different foods and we try to bring that back in and help people find the balance of their nutrition guidelines but also eating foods that are sustainable and enjoyable for them we find that incredibly valuable and people report that is something they have taken away from the program.

Melanya: yes, and kind of going along with that rediscovering the joy of eating within the nutrition setting is building confidence to cook and make it a normal process of your lives and realize it can be realistic and not as time consuming as they may have thought. Doing something new can be intimidating, nobody likes to fail, but don’t think about it as a failure, think about it as an opportunity to explore flavors and gain experience. Cooking is not as rigid as one would think, and most recipes are flexible. Part of what the HTK offers is an opportunity to experiment with encouragement and peer support, and people kind of find out they are more creative and resourceful that they may have thought before.

Beth: OK, you both have me sold on this, no wonder you guys are co leading this program, and I know it’s a national priority for all VA locations to have their own HTK. However, if there local VA doesn’t have it up and running yet or maybe at a class time they cannot attend how could they access to the healthy teaching kitchen video if not in the class?

Robin: yes, so we have a lot of online resources, we have live classes online video and recipes, so I’ll start by highlighting where you can find recipes, http://www.nutrition.va.gov/Recipes.asp. There are specific cookbooks in there and a whole library of recipes that is searchable that is a great place to get started.

Melanya: in addition to recipes and cookbooks, you can also find recorded classes on YouTube, so visit www.youtube.com , then search bar pop in “VA Healthy Teaching Kitchen” you can subscribe and see all the content on there and we are continuously adding new content to that. In addition to that channel one of our VA locations offers Facebook live HTK classes in Chicago, Visit: www.facebook.com/VAChicago you can tune in to those classes and she also has recordings of the classes.

Beth: Yes, everybody needs to check that out, I have listened to one of the Chicago ones and they really do a good job. So I have to ask, what is your favorite healthy teaching kitchen or biggest recipe hit so far?

Robin-that is really hard to narrow it down, but I have to say the one that I make most often is the Crustless Quiche which is a combination of milk eggs and cheese, some of our top favorites mixed in with a lot of different vegetables and I bake them in muffin tins so that once they are cool you can pop them out and put in Ziploc bag in the freezer and just take them out as you need for a really quick and easy breakfast.

Lindsey: Those sound absolutely amazing I’m going to add those to my recipes for next week.

Beth: Absolutely

Melanya-it really is hard to narrow it down, one of my favorites would be orange chicken. It’s a homemade orange chicken recipe you use zest and juice from the orange to make the flavor for the sauce but it really builds into my cooking strategy for myself in terms as I can make the sauce in bulk ahead of time and freeze in little containers and pull one out when I want to make it for a quick and easy weeknight dish and I can add whatever vegetables I want if I have leftovers or surplus or just bag of steamed vegetables I can just toss it in there and make a stir-fry and its really simple. Even if I didn’t want to use chicken I could whip up some tofu or chop up some leftover sandwich meat, it all kind of works with the sauce. In our classes you know we explore different flavors and just because you think you don’t like a food doesn’t mean you actually don’t like it you may have had it prepared in a way you didn’t like, food tastes different when you put it together with other foods and different flavors so pushing that boundary and trying new things might help you discover that you may like something you didn’t previously.

Lindsey: that is such a great tip, I think that’s one everyone can really use that moving forward.

Beth: These are such great ideas! I just love talking about other ways to build out recipes and using leftovers and I know you mentioned the other day tofu chocolate mousse for dessert, sounds amazing but it may be outside someone’s comfort zone but we do encourage everyone to try new things. We really thank you all for the hard work you and other Dietitians that have put together these HTK clinics together and sharing videos with us across the country. To everyone at home, be sure to subscribe to this podcast, rate the series and leave a review! The team at Fresh Focus thanks you for listening!