Tag Archives: food demonstrations

Dining with Diabetes

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We’ve started an evening class at the Center at Spring Street. Last Thursday about 12 people came for the introduction and registration. I helped people do A1c tests and also used the blood pressure machine. As a dietitian and diabetes educator, I don’t usually touch much more than an hand or finger of clients. To do BPs, I felt like I had to get all up in their armpits to wrap the cuff around at the right place! So many people had such large upper arms, it was good we had 2 cuff sizes. Not sure how accurate the readings were, many said they were higher than usual, but I guess we’ll control for operator error if I do it again in the fall at the final class.
August 12th is the final class for my first group. Looking forward to seeing them all and hoping to see progress when we re-measure A1c, BP, and WC. I’ll analyze the data for my presentation. August 5th I travel to Penn State main campus where the Cooperative Extension main nutrition office is and meet with Julie Cooper who manages all the data from the DWD programs all over the state. I’ll also meet with my supervisor, Jill and she will complete the paperwork for this practicum. Everything is just moving along nicely, what a relief!

Update on Chrissy’s Practicum!

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I’ve been working on my practicum since May. As I described in my initial post, May and June were filled with lots of logistical issues to tackle regarding food safety, scheduling, and selecting recipes.

We started attending the markets in late June, and had several “kick-off” events that we completed with key members of the community. We were lucky enough to work with the Mayor’s office to coordinate a joint kick-off event with the Mayor, the Department of Agriculture, WIC, and the Department of Transitional Assistance. The photo below is from the South Station farmers market in downtown Boston, and shows my coworker and I with Mayor Menino doing a food demo for “veggie salsa”. Here is a link to the news write-up about it on UMass Extension’s website! – http://www.umassextension.org/index.php/component/content/article/49/703-mayor-menino

For 6 weeks, we did awesome food demos at the markets. We provided samples for people which were prepared in a licensed kitchen ahead of time and kept under mechanical refrigeration, and provided copies of the recipe for people to take home. People were very receptive to this, and we ended up giving out between 60 and 112 samples & recipes at each market (we stayed 2-4 hours at each and 112 was the max our fridge held).

However, at the 6 week mark, our fridges started to fail and weren’t maintaining proper temperature. We have since been working with Inspectional Services on a new plan. Unfortunately, it has been really tough to find models that do keep temperature outside on hot summer days that are also light enough for staff to carry and small enough to fit in our cars.

We are still working to come up with a solution to this issue. However, in the meantime, we have been giving out healthy recipes which I selected from UMass Extension’s website (check out the recipe database here – http://www.umassextension.org/nutrition/index.php/publications/recipes/recipes), as well as handouts on nutrition education.

I’ve currently been working on developing/conducting evaluation, and will hopefully have some good information to share soon!