On March 17th, I went green with Fuel Up to Play 60 Georgia state winner, Lovinggood Middle School. Joined by their teaching staff dressed as cows, the USDA, and the ladies of the Weight Management Dietetic Practice Group, students dedicated their day to planting gardens and celebrating Calcium with a performance from the Rockstar Nutritionist. Food and Nutrition Services Supervisor, Cindy Culver, hosts this video to showcase the day.
On The Beat with the Rockstar Nutritionist
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Symposium Features Rockstar Nutritionist: Sharing Evidence Lightens a Heavy Topic
Jill Jayne to Keynote at the Weight Management Dietetic Practice Group Symposium in Atlanta March 18, 2011
In the war against obesity, registered dietitians (RDs) are on the front lines of the battle. Every day, they help people of all ages and health conditions to better manage weight. Training in the latest proven methods is mandatory for the RDs to reverse this national epidemic.
From 3/18-3/20, the Weight Management Dietetic Practice Group (WM DPG) will hold its national symposium: Weight Management: A Lifelong Experience at the InterContinental Hotel in Atlanta.
What a launch! We sent our new tunes into official orbit this past weekend at the Food & Nutrition Conference & Expo, held in the lovely Boston, MA. The CD, officially titled Goin’ on a Journey: Songs for Every Body, CD joins our fleet of healthy habits musical offerings that now include both preschool and elementary. It is now available on Amazon and iTunes!
Jump with Jill
Jill & Jam
Dietitians from around the globe enjoyed a photo opp with “The Jills,” featuring the real Jill Jayne, MS, RD– creator of Jump with Jill– and the new avatar Jill. Avatar Jill represents our expansion of the show to improve our reach and vision as we tour multiple casts of Jills around the country.
The Food & Nutrition Conference & Expo is a conference specifically for the Registered Dietitian and Diet Technician. Most RDs have 5-7 years of training, separating us from your average health nut. The interest is beyond nutrients, but to how food helps and hurts our bodies and the world we live. This conference is our profession’s Christmas, the event a dietitian’s entire year revolves around. We rally our healthy messages all year long, and arrive to the conference ready for professional development, to connect with colleagues and to check out the latest in food trends dancing in our heads.
Exhibitors like myself share the show floor with giants like Frito Lay, Coca Cola, Pepsi, Nestle and Hershey’s. These companies are also sponsors of the conference, so you can imagine how the foods they produce are positioned to us.
*Have you heard that there is now more whole grains in chips?
*Did you know that kids will eat more carrots when dipped in a moderate amount of ranch dressing?
*Did you know that high fructose corn syrup is now called corn sugar?
*Have your heard about Hershey’s new “Moderation Nation” that promotes moderation, not depravation, as the key to a healthy life?
Dietitians walked away with totes filled like Santa Claus, with samples to spread the good product cheer, but the hope has to be that this new wave of marketability of “health” can continue to transform items we still can call food. Just like Christmas, it’s not about the presents. It’s our continued vigilance in educating our clients and customers about how to cut through this stealthy new food PR. After a day on the show floor with so many pastes, fortification and selling points, all I want is a salad.
This past sunday, dietitians in the metro New York area gathered for our monthly mini-meeting in the great outdoors of my beautiful urban backyard garden. Everyone is excited for the second annual!
First course: grilled veggies and salad!
L to R front: Taniesa Stanton, Jamie Mok, Jill Jayne, Karolina Starczak, Brenda Murdock, Jen Regester, Sarah Amer L to R back: Jaime Schwartz, Kate Donelan, Rachel Meltzer, Tammy Lakatos Shames, Lyssie Lakatos (missing from photograph Idy Neuman)
Special Delivery for a Registered Dietitian!
There are many little perks to being a dietitian– friends look to you for sound advice on navigating a restaurant menu, chefs want to impress you and companies send you free stuff in hopes that you will recommend it. I have noticed an interesting trend in the free stuff I have recently received. Junk food companies are jumping on the healthy bandwagon, producing potato chips with actual potatoes, using less salt, and incorporating whole grains. It becomes a game of lesser evil; if you are going to eat it, eat the real stuff.
The change in production speaks to a larger trend. Healthy, whole foods and transparency about ingredients has become popular, and profitable. Perhaps the largest counter argument made by big business to continue making such a low quality “food” (dehydrated potatoes preserved with an unpronounceable list of chemicals fifty ingredients long) is that consumers keep buying it. It’s our choice if we want to be fat… right? Little did we know just how terrible our food was, and as more and more is uncovered about our food, consumers are raising their standards and the resulting healthcare costs have caused policy changes, too. Some recent examples include posting calorie counts on restaurant menus and mandating an industry reduction in salt. Food companies are answering, and when giants like Frito-Lay get involved, this is big business creating supply for the demand. Healthy food is gradually becoming profitable. And while there may be no such thing as a free lunch, this is the best bag of free chips I have ever had.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OGM_RjaN4Gk&feature=player_embedded]
The world’s dietitians gather every year at the Food & Nutrition Conference & Expo (FNCE) presented by the American Dietetic Association (ADA). We plan all year for this much coveted face time.
This year we took on the Mile High City of Denver, Colorado and covered an array of hot nutrition topics by day, networked by night, and explored the latest in food products at the Expo. I was a very busy woman for this conference, with a table on the Expo show floor to feature Get Me Goin’, while I attempted professional development. It was here one year ago that the Get Me Goin’ CD debuted, and I was riding high on the compliments of colleagues that were excited to see my triumphant return.
Suze Orman kicked off the conference with a sharp keynote address about how to save and spend, and ADA President Jessie Pavlinac announced she would be a torch bearer in the 2010 Winter Olympics! I toured the Frito Lay chip factory and ate chips hot off the line! I wined and dined at a locally-sourced restaurant called Rioja (where I so was inspired by a raw brussel sprouts
salad that I now have this a signature dish in my own cooking) and bought a book atTattered Cover. I spent time on
the
show floor mingling with food companies and organizations large and small that have a vested interest in health. It is exciting to be at the juncture where food products and the dietitian meet:
famous food companies (capital + reach)
+ registered dietitians (knowledge + sass)
= powerful solution to overhaul how America eats through both access and education
By the way, ADA just launched their new website, have you seen it? www.eatright.org.
Tags: American, Colorado, Get Me Goin'
Last week my colleagues from my nutrition entrepreneurs group convened at “Pump.” It was the first food I had ever seen or tasted that resembled my cooking at home. Consider this the highest compliment.
Over the years, the percentage of food that Americans eat outside the home has been increasing. Almost 52% of American food dollars are spent on food consumed outside the home, up from 25% in the 1970’s (1,2). As you can probably attest, foods in restaurants tend to be higher in fat, saturated fat, cholesterol, and sodium, and lower in fiber, calcium, and iron (3). Generally, the only appeal honored when you are eating out is taste and value for the buck. So in addition to not being as healthy as you would choose, restaurant portion sizes tend to be 2-3 times larger than what you would serve yourself (4).
Interestingly, these trends in eating out have correlated with the nation’s obesity epidemic—and serve as a major force behind why labeling of menus is becoming an industry standard. Health experts hope that by forcing restaurants to declare their calorie contents, (a) people will make better choices (b) the demand for healthier food might require restaurants to adapt menu items with a healthier profile. Besides, unless you’re the Hardy Burger (weighing in at 1420 calories) trying for the “holy cow” news story, disclosing fat content could be a storm of bad PR.
And then there’s “Pump.” They serve regular, healthy food. And that is their entire gimmick. You don’t have to modify and change the menu to an annoyed waiter. It comes exactly how you’d make it yourself. Nothing is fried and they don’t cook with butter, cream, or mayo. Their menu tells you exactly what’s in it, and they serve a portion appropriate for a human, not a horse. Now, eating half of your meals outside your home is not going to make you fat.
The story for “Pump” is also a feat in marketing. As we dietitians grazed on the perfectly portioned foods, we realized we weren’t the only entrepreneurs in the room. CEO Adam Eskin, a reformed Wall Streeter, was midstream into turning this niche way of eating into the main stream. The first “Pump” opened in 1996 in New York City by Steve & Elena Kapelonis. They opened several locations citywide that became famed hot spots for bodybuilders, actors and athletes that signed “Pump” walls. The original locations are tiny hole-in-the-wall joints, averaging 500 to 600 square feet. But within the last two years, the new management has opened locations that you can not only turn around in, but that you can eat inside. Eskin and his team simplified the menu, expanded the décor, and hired a registered dietitian (YEAH!) to properly portion and calculate the menu. The experience is now marketed to the mainstream with the slogan, “We think, you eat.”
In honor of the generosity of “Pump” and their staff, I’m thrilled to offer a giveaway for a “Pump” entrée.
GIVEAWAY: Enjoy a FREE super-charged plate entrée with a coupon from “Pump”. The coupons expire Sept 30, 2009. You must live or work in New York City to enter. If you’d like to win it, simply comment on this blog with your email address and you will be entered to win. Contest closes September 10th.
1 USDA Economic Research Service, 2008
2 Clauson and Leibtag, 2008
3 Center for Science in the Public Interest, 1995
4 Review of Agricultural Economics, 2008
Tags: American Dietetic Association, New York City, Nutrition Entrepreuners
As we loaded in our equipment for our first show, students were in music class in the gym rehearsing their hawnky tawnk line dance for their spring concert. I thought this was pretty neat. After our show we visited the sites where we crossed paths with 3 Elvises, tried on cowboy hats, and were almost mowed over by Nashville security guards on Segways. We were actually being stopped because the cop wanted to know how Mark and I got our hair so spiky.
Day 2 was intense: an elementary school show in the morning and afternoon PLUS keynoting at the Tennessee Dietetic Annual conference in the evening. I was about ready to drop, so we went to the Cheesecake Factory for a little r & r & dessert… only to find that everyone from the dietetic conference was there, too! I walked in and an entire table of dietitians were screaming the riff to the water song I had serenaded them with just moments ago, startling me from my exhaustion. I do believe this outburst may have been caused by more than just drinking water. Mark (my brother/business partner/fellow rocker) was very impressed that dietitians ate at the Cheesecake Factory and finally gave his seal of approval for my choice of career.
We made FOX primetime news for all our efforts. I was waiting outside the school as Mark announced my grand entrance to a room full of excited kids when the news truck came barreling around the corner to catch us in action. They ran to me with their cameras and mics and I hit the stage with them in tow. Looking at the clip, I realize how hot is was in Nashville– 67 degrees! Coming from subzero March tempatures in New York, it felt like the Bahamas. My makeup was running off my eyelids before the show even started!
Tags: American Dietetic Association, Jump with Jill, Local TV, Tennessee
