Pink and Dude Chefs: Findings from an Evidence-Based Nutrition Education and Culinary Skills Program for Adolescents in Afterschool Settings

Introduction

Childhood obesity is a public health emergency that disproportionately impacts children from economically disadvantaged families and Hispanic and African-American children . Moreover, its annual economic burden in the US is an unsustainable $200 billion. A 1% point reduction in overweight and obesity among young people would translate into a $500 million national savings over their lifetimes.

Intervention strategies to combat childhood obesity tend not to be theory driven or evidence-based. Behavioral prevention strategies must include skill development, such as meal planning and food preparation skills as a means to develop lifelong healthy dietary behaviors. Most programs focus solely on nutrition education, leaving significant gaps in efforts to provide quality programming. Therefore, we designed and evaluated a community-based health promotion and obesity prevention program based in social cognitive and social ecological theory as a framework for increasing participants’ self-efficacy for healthy cooking; providing a fun and safe environment conducive for cooperative learning; and for building nutrition knowledge, skills and confidence.

Methods

The Pink and Dude Chefs program, a 12-lesson curriculum including topics ranging from nutrition basics to USDA guidelines, was applied in a classroom setting (45 min) and followed by a kitchen-based hands-on culinary component (90 min) that focused on applying knowledge and developing self-efficacy in experiences ranging from kitchen safety and correct knife use to recipe literacy and low-cost meal preparation.

The program was implemented from 2008-2013 in two low-income largely Hispanic communities in California among five cohorts of boys and girls aged 11-14 years (58 total participants) in partnership with a YMCA afterschool program.

Results

Participants in different cohorts showed improvements in culinary self-efficacy (p =0.005), increases in preferences for fruits (p=0.01) with similar but weaker associations for vegetable preferences and fruit and vegetable intake, and significant increase in nutrition knowledge (p<0.0001) and cooking skills (p=0.02). Results showed that adolescents increased their knowledge of cooking from scratch, creating meals using recipes, using leftovers, and cooking low cost meals. Most importantly, participants felt more confident that they could positively impact what their families ate.

Conclusion

Theory-driven, evidence-based programming may be a powerful adjunct to wider efforts to stem obesity.