CHEF ASHLEY KEYES HELPS FAMILIES DEVELOP A MINDSET TO EAT HEALTHY
What are children eating for lunch today? How about pizza and french fries? If your child is 1 of the more than 31 million students who eat a school-prepared lunch, those are likely 2 of the main staples she or he will be given. Today’s school lunch foods (even though efforts have been made to improve them) are heavy on the carbs, sugars, salt and preservatives. Raw vegetables and lean meats? Probably not. But take heart, Chef Ashley Keyes is helping families discover easy healthy lunches that kids can make! She wants you to discover these easy healthy lunches too.
THE CHOICES CHEF ASHLEY HELPS FAMILIES MAKE
Executive Chef Ashley Keyes brings leadership to Atlanta-based C.H.O.I.C.E.S., an organization that helps tackles childhood obesity through nutrition education. With her vast experience, Chef Ashley is a trusted voice in helping families prepare healthy school lunches with tasty and nutritious recipes. 1 in 5 children and teens in the U.S. is now obese, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. School meals have been partly blamed for this increase. Given that schools serve five billion meals annually, this issue underscores the urgent need for healthier meal options.
Chef Ashley’s innovative recipes are designed to combat this problem by offering nutritious, easy-to-prepare, and kid-approved meals. Her approach provides a practical remedy, ensuring that children receive the essential vitamins, minerals, and nutrients they need to stay energized and focused throughout the day.
Her love for God is evident as she shares her knowledge and passion for great tasting food with children and their parents. As families experience this better way of eating they start to develop a mindset that their bodies are miraculously created to thrive. They don’t need to rely on popularized processed foods that are being thrown at them but instead can easily make lunches that free them to be healthy, energetic and all that God intends for a more robust life.
OK KIDS – LET’S DO THIS
So, let’s get prepping and eating. Chef Keyes has two recipes that are super easy for kids to make. Parents – start by getting these good ingredients and TAKING TIME to have fun making this with your children. Make extra and eat some while you’re preparing and packaging these lunches because they’re looking to you to demonstrate an appetite for good food.
Once you get these lunch basics down then you can tap into more of the Choices For Kids Programs, get more recipe ideas and start to create you own too.
A COMMITMENT TO CHOOSE GOOD IN THE DESERTS, SWAMPS AND DAILY LIFE
Here at Faith & Fitness Magazine we’ve observed that healthy foods and meals within the United States and likely most of the developed world, can be more frequently consumed when leadership and individuals within communities, food providers and households intentionally choose to provide it, get it and eat it. We assert that the “scarcity” of healthy foods is often really an outcome of “choice evolution” based in part on learned experiences, convenience, priorities, and other factors all coming together. These complex collections of circumstances result in obesity, poor health and disease.
This is why we really champion Chef Ashley Keyes, C.H.O.I.C.E.S. and the business, communities, families and individuals – all stake holders who are coming together to lead, inspire and educate this and future generations to consistently choose healthy food.
This perspective at first may appear to run counter to the widely popular conclusions that urban and suburban food deserts are to blame for food scarcity, obesity and the resulting poor health. In reality it adds a greater spiritual understanding that is expressed well by Christine Anne Vaughan and Tamara Dubowitz in the Rand article Fixing America’s Food Deserts Alone Won’t Fix Our Terrible Diets. They say:
Your personal characteristics may be more important to your diet than where you shop and what’s available to you—a concept that challenges the popular notion that building supermarkets in so-called food deserts can, by itself, help the nation’s consumers develop better eating habits. Sure, if a supermarket is plopped down in a food desert—an area where it is difficult to find affordable or quality fresh food—shoppers may come. But their weakness for doughnuts and cookies will walk through those automatic doors with them.
Many food deserts may in fact be food swamps – areas where fast food restaurants and highly-processed sugary, salty, fatty convenience foods outnumber healthy choices. The supply is driven by the demand.
Chef Keye’s and C.H.O.I.C.E.S’ on-going and well-focused instruction blended with conviction and passion we believe is a powerful and effective model that communities need to copy to affect immediate and long term change.
When communities support parents who commit to easy and healthy lunches that kids can make, then children will over time develop more wholesome appetites.
Faith & Fitness Magazine believes that whether communities or parents realize it or not this is reflective of the biblical truth, that what things are good, pure, wholesome – ‘God given’, we can and should think, focus and feed on these things. When we do, we gain a mindset that is spirit free.
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