Sneak Peek from the Member Library

Posted on November 29, 2016 by Stephanie Ronco

Have you heard about the Food and Health Membership program? It’s chock-full of fantastic resources for educators, including…

Access to all materials with a comprehensive, searchable database that is loaded with nutrition articles, chef-tested recipes, and engaging handouts.
White-label newsletters that you can use to create your own content.
Memorable handouts. Access all of these handouts in a library that is categorized for easy use.
Presentation and interactive project ideas for wellness fairs, classes, lunch-and-learn sessions, cooking demonstrations, and health fairs.
Chef-developed and exhaustively-tested recipes for meals that are both delicious and healthful.
The latest food news and scientific research. (Since we don’t accept outside funding or sponsorship of any kind, we can bring you the latest news, free of bias).
A translation tool that helps you translate all your articles for non-English-speaking clients. You can copy and paste to create handouts in all languages!
A food and health celebrations calendar that features monthly themes, food- and health-related holidays, seasonal produce, relevant clip art, handouts, and more.
Satisfaction, guaranteed!

Today I want to share one of those popular articles with you. Lisa C. Andrews, MEd, RD, LD has put together a great guide for throwing and attending healthful holiday parties this year. Here’s what she has to say…

The holidays come upon us fast, and so can holiday weight gain… if you’re not careful. Below are some simple swaps to prevent “a little round belly that shakes when you laugh like a bowl full of jelly.”

1. Serve veggies and dip for appetizers. Pepper strips, grape tomatoes, and cucumbers look beautiful when arranged around a bowl of hummus or dip.

2. Swap plain Greek yogurt for sour cream in your favorite dips. Your guests likely won’t notice the change and they’ll get a nice dose of protein and calcium.

3. Sauté onions and garlic for stuffing in non-stick spray or low sodium broth in place of oil, butter, or margarine.

4. Try mashed sweet potatoes with orange juice, ginger, and cinnamon in place of marshmallows, brown sugar, and butter.

5. Use 1% or 2% milk in mashed potatoes in place of whole milk or heavy cream. This cuts calories and fat from the dish.

6. Keep selzter water on hand for “mocktails”. Pour over ice and add a twist of lime. Voila! No hangover.

7. Use whipped butter or light margarine in place of stick butter. This reduces fat and calories.

8. Use reduced-fat mayonnaise in place of full-fat mayonnaise in dips and dressings. Olive oil varieties provide heart-healthy monounsaturated fat.
9. Try a salad dressing spritzer in place of bottled dressings. Blend olive oil, balsamic vinegar, and dijon mustard together for your own dressing.

10. Substitute jarred baby prunes, mashed bananas, applesauce, or plain yogurt for the fat in baked goods (such as quick breads).

11. Split desserts with your spouse, a friend, or other party guests. You may not be hungry for a full piece of pie, anyway.

12. Chop vegetables and add them to soups, stews, salads, and casseroles. This boosts the fiber and nutrient content, and also adds color to your dish.

13. Add seasonal fruit such as apples, pears, or pomegranates to salads in place of dried fruit. This adds texture and taste to your salad while reducing added sugar.

By Lisa C. Andrews, MEd, RD, LD

Remember, this article (and thousands of others) was only available to members until I decided to preview it today. If you liked what you saw, check out what a membership entails or just sign up today!

Oh, and here’s a printable version of the handout Lisa wrote…

And here are some other holiday resources…

Holiday Buttons Fruit and Veggie Lights 2.75" X 1.75" rectangle - Pack of 10

$28.00 ~~$32.00~~

Add to Cart

Holiday Color Handout Tearpad

$42.00 ~~$46.00~~

Add to Cart

Inside Look: What’s On Your Fork?

Posted on November 1, 2016 by Stephanie Ronco

Have you ever gotten a bit carried away on a new project?

I know I have.

But that doesn’t always have to be a bad thing.

In fact, getting carried away on a wave on enthusiasm and creativity often leads to the creation of some of my favorite materials!

Take these fork photo resources, for example.

I was experimenting with forks holding different foods and I… well… got carried away. I had just made a new photo studio with strobe lights and all kinds of props. As I played with each one, I saw styrofoam and stuck a fork in it.

The rest is history.

The timing was extra fortuitous for this particular round of inspiration because it turns out that the theme for National Nutrition Month 2017 is “Put Your Best Fork Forward!” These materials — which I have been creating since this summer when I was working on my food photo portfolio — will be perfect for that celebration.

Here’s a collection of the fork lessons in different formats. Which will appeal most to your clients?

Display Resources:

Prizes:

And here’s a closer look at my artist’s statement, which captures why and how I do what I do…

The concept of my work is that I create art with food and then photograph it in an evocative and dramatic manner. I am drawn to working with fruits and vegetables. The first reason is because my business is dedicated to nutrition education and the promotion of foods that are nutrient dense, high in fiber and low in added fat, sugar, and salt (three evils of processed food in the Western world). The second reason is because I love finding fruits and vegetables in farmers’ markets and coming home with them and exploring new and creative ways to photograph them. My experience as a pastry chef leads me to want to arrange my subjects in a very artistic manner and to create salads and many other types of dishes that appear decadent even though they are healthful.

The materials that I use consist of fruits, vegetables, grains, and protein foods that are fresh, in season, and available in local markets. I have a variety of props and backdrops as well as a light table. I have a full sensor Nikon D800 camera, strobe lights, and a natural light studio, also known as my dining room, which has a taller table for my shoots.

My process consists of researching and shopping in local food markets to purchase items from local farmers and food producers. I create a scene and shoot it different ways in my studio. This makes my shots more compiled than found and they have a theme for the viewer. They might be based on Mediterranean foods, phytochemicals, food groups, or just one seasonal ingredient like berries. The outcome is an artistic photograph that is inspirational to the viewer. It is a celebration of food as it nourishes the body!

By Judy Doherty, AOS, BS, PC II

As a special treat today, I want to share the printable handout that accompanies the Wise Choices Poster. Take a look!

And here are a few of the fork resources that you can get today!

Fork Banner 48" X 36"

$88.00 ~~$110.00~~

Add to Cart

Fork Photo Wall Decals - "Walloons" Set of 8" Wall Decals - Set of 6

$45.00

Add to Cart

Fork Stickers 2" - Pack of 100

$12.99 ~~$12.99~~

Add to Cart

Quiz: Make a Healthy Plate

Posted on March 23, 2016 by Stephanie Ronco

Quizzes are great vehicles for teaching key health lessons and making sure they stick. Today, as a special treat, I’d like to share one of the quizzes from the PowerPoint show Make a Healthy Plate. This show is one of the chapters in the 12 More Lessons of Wellness and Weight Loss program, which is a comprehensive employee weight loss program.

Are you ready for the sneak peek?

All right, here’s the quiz. Take a look at the slide above. Which plate has the most calories? Is it Plate A, with a chicken fried steak and fries, or is it Plate B, the one filled with a chicken and vegetable stir fry alongside some brown rice?

You may not be surprised to see that it’s Plate A that has the most calories, but look at how many more calories it has than Plate B. Plate A has 1,121 calories, while Plate B has only 356 calories. That’s a 765 calorie difference!

Let’s take a closer look at each plate. You get the calorie total in Plate A by combining an 8-ounce fried steak — which has 521 calories — with 6 ounces worth of French fries. That serving has 600 calories, which brings the total up to 1,121 calories. The fat content is nothing to sneeze at either. When the 21 grams of fat in the steak join the 33 fat grams in the fries, they add up to 54 total grams of fat on that plate alone!

Now let’s do the same math for Plate B. A single cup of carrots and a cup of broccoli each have 54 calories. The chicken breast has another 140 calories, and the brown rice has 108 calories. When you add all that up, you get 356 calories for the plate. And the fat grams are much smaller as well. Each cup of vegetables has less than 1 gram of fat, and the brown rice has none at all. The chicken breast has 3 grams of fat, which brings the fat total for the whole plate to roughly 4 grams of fat.

That’s where I’m going to end the slide preview for today. This excerpt comes from pretty early in the Healthy Plate PowerPoint. The show goes on to cover the basics of MyPlate, the components of each My Plate food group, strategies for eyeballing the correct portions, ways to calculate the total calories on your plate, and even methods for “shrinking your plate” at each meal. Fun pop quizzes pepper the presentation, which ends with a review of its most important points.

And that’s just 1 chapter of the 12 that are featured in the 12 More Lessons of Wellness and Weight Loss program! I wasn’t kidding when I said that it was comprehensive. Check out the details for the 12 lessons in the link below…

Here’s a PDF copy of all the slides you saw today — feel free to use the quiz however you’d like!

And here are some other great resources from the Nutrition Education Store!

My Plate Banner - Health Fair Banner Featuring Choose MyPlate 48X36

$88.00 ~~$110.00~~

Add to Cart

Fruit-Shaped Erasers - Pack of 100

$99.00

Add to Cart

Inside Look: Fabulous Fruits and Veggies

Posted on September 2, 2015 by Stephanie Ronco

You already know that September is Fruits and Veggies More Matters Month, but have you seen our new fruit and vegetable poster?

This is one of my favorites yet, and it offers a great way to promote healthful eating patterns. Fabulous Fruits and Veggies is perfect for offices, health fair displays, cooking demonstrations, cafeterias, schools, and more!

So how did this one come to be?

Here’s a sneak peek…

After seeing all the gorgeous fruits and vegetables at the Davis farmers’ markets, I knew that I had to feature their magnificent colors and textures in a new poster. I wanted to highlight the brightness and freshness of fruits and veggies, but I wasn’t quite sure how to start.

The answer lay in a collage.

I combined images of various fruits and vegetables, arranging them into bright patterns and stripes. And that’s when it hit me — fruits and veggies can take you up, up, and away! What better way to highlight that health and energy boost than with the colorful hot air balloons that so often dot the skies by my house.

I worked with my team of artists to create a picture of people setting off on hot air balloon adventures, adjusting and tweaking the picture until I got it just right.

But what to call the poster?

That’s where my editorial team came in. We did a few rounds of brainstorming, exploring titles like “Fuel Your Adventures with Fruits and Vegetables,” “Fruit and Vegetable Explorations,” and “Get and Fruit and Vegetable Boost,” but ultimately, we decided to keep it simple with “Fabulous Fruits and Veggies.”

And here comes the best part.

The handout.

My team and I decided that we wanted the free handout that accompanies this poster to feature lots of fun ways to incorporate fruits and vegetables into a healthy eating pattern. Pretty great timing for Fruits and Veggies More Matters Month, huh? The best part is that you can get this handout, today! Simply click on the picture of the handout above and you can download your very own PDF copy, for free. Hooray!

And of course, if you like what you see, consider getting a print of this wonderful poster. It’s as engaging as it is versatile, and is sure to brighten up any space!

There are lots of great new resources in the Nutrition Education Store these days! Which one will make your life easier?

Fruit and Veggie Pens

Diabetes 101 Presentation

Exercise Poster

We’re here to help you look your very best, right now.

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