A lifestyle youth enhancement project in a low-income area of Mississippi, will use the $1,000 grant to buy a blender and food supplies for its educational seminars.

Learn more about the CWC nutrition grant program at: http://www.consumerwellness.org/NutritionalGrantProgram.html

Update: May, 2011

The Lifestyle Youth Enhancement Project is conducted in a low-income neighborhood in Jackson, Mississippi. The project participants are 20 youth ranging in age from 12-19 and 5 parents ranging in age from 31-38 who meet weekly for instruction and activities that focus on lifestyle changes to promote physical and mental health and academic achievement. Snacks are provided for the weekly Wednesday meetings and for the bimonthly Sunday meetings. Because the project has had to rely on donated food, the snacks have been generally unhealthy. Occasionally fresh fruit and vegetables were donated by a local food pantry, but in late 2010 this food pantry ceased its operation.

The nutrition component of the Project started in January, 2011 to provide health screening, to teach healthy eating and to provide more healthy weekly snacks.

In order to determine their starting diets, students were asked to keep food diaries for the first 2 weeks of the program. The diaries were started on January 12, but did not continue for 2 weeks. The students were embarrassed to write what they actually ate and drank because for most of them their main meal was lunch at school, with mainly junk food or no food eaten at home. Therefore, instead of keeping diaries for 2 weeks, they kept them for 3 days—January 12, February 1, and April 13. Although the diaries were kept for only 3 days, they did reveal things we needed to teach in the Nutrition Spotlights which began the first week of February. We were able to compare the April diaries with the January and February diaries to see if the students were making changes in their diets as a result of the nutrition activities.

Click here to read the full progress report (PDF - 3.24mb)

Photos taken during the program: