Nutrition class teaches South L.A. women to put health first

News

Nutrition class teaches South L.A. women to put health first

LA Times
April 13th, 2011

Credit: jenna.kaminsky / Flickr

By Sandy Banks

The ladies clogging the canned food aisles at the Crenshaw-area Ralphs last week weren’t trying to find the best deals for their pocketbooks, but the smartest choices for their bodies.

The peaches intended for Sunday’s cobbler? Those packed in “extra heavy” syrup come with twice the calories as the “extra light” variety.

The chicken broth for a hearty soup? “Natural goodness” on the label means 400 fewer grams of sodium. Substitute brown rice for white, and you’ve got half the calories and twice the fiber.

“This is why we have so many sick people,” one heavyset, gray-haired woman griped as she studied the label on her favorite brand of pinto beans. She scribbled the numbers — sodium, sugars, fat, calories, fiber — on the worksheet pinned to her clipboard, then put the can back and moved on.

This wasn’t a shopping trip; it was a class. And the two dozen students from South Los Angeles were trying to get their healthy on.

The story is familiar and the stats are dismal: Blacks are twice as likely as whites to have diabetes, 30% more likely to die from heart disease and almost twice as likely to be obese. Almost a quarter of black families live in communities where supermarkets are scarce and heavily stocked with processed foods.

That’s what led the Los Angeles Urban League to launch a series of cooking, nutrition and exercise classes in the Crenshaw area two years ago.

Claudette Akers began with the fitness class — two hours every Saturday in Van Ness park, where personal trainers offer lessons from tai chi to Latin dancing. That led her to the nutrition class, which landed her at Ralphs last Thursday night with her daughter, Ayesha Wallace, a junior on spring break from UC Santa Barbara.

Akers was stunned to see how much fat and sodium were in the meat-flavored pasta sauce. She had already banished fried foods from her menu, but hadn’t realized how unhealthy pasta could be.

Now she’s trying to steer her daughter away from the kinds of quick, processed meals that sustain many a college student. “I bought her a George Foreman Grill,” Akers said. “I want her to cook real food, something that will last her for a couple of meals.” While we talked, Ayesha checked the back of a Lunchables Cracker Stacker. The bologna, crackers and processed cheese add up to half a day’s worth of sodium and fat.

I was mortified, recalling the many days I had sent a daughter off to school with a Lunchable in her backpack.

This story continues at Los Angeles Times.