Kate Cronin, a colleague of Adams, is the outreach specialist and program coordinator for HCSF. She helped foster a positive support network by traveling to the Menominee reservation to cook with parents and children. She hoped to combat the myth that eating healthy is too difficult and expensive. At the end of the day, all parents are capable of finding ways to get the right foods on a child’s dinner plate.
“Our hypothesis is that those families who receive social support for a longer period of time will actually be more engaged and will do better,” says Cronin.
As she and her fellow researchers found, children involved in preparation of foods were more willing to try them. Additionally, children who were served new foods in a group setting were more adventurous eaters.
“It was really an opportunity to give parents easy recipes for foods that their kids would like, but that included fruits, vegetables, protein—they were healthy, but still tasty,” says Cronin.
Yet as Adams states, food is only one piece of the puzzle. Members of the Menominee community maintain their own unique concept about what it means to raise a healthy child. By placing equal emphasis on emotional, spiritual and physical conditions, reservation members look at clinical aspects of health as only one fragment to a more holistic sense of well-being. Parents and grandparents alike want to raise children that are well fed, but also focus their efforts on overall happiness and comfort.
To address these issues, researchers are working with the community to conduct a new five-year phase of the HCSF study. Cronin is working hard to develop lesson plans for parents targeting six key areas of concern. These include increasing fruits and vegetables, decreasing screen time with TV and electronics, increasing physical activity, managing stress, creating good sleep habits and decreasing sugar intake.
Assistant Scientist and past HCSF Researcher, Tara LaRowe agrees that intake of sugar-sweetened beverages is one of the biggest contributors to unhealthy habits among children. She also further highlights diets high in saturated fat, carbohydrates, processed foods and white flour products as major sources of malnutrition.
The Menominee Nation’s eagerness and willingness to avoid these foods and promote healthy eating has become a positive platform for growth and development. Community gardens provide mothers with produce, schools work to improve cafeteria lunches and health centers increase exercise opportunities for children after school. On top of all these efforts, the new Save-A-Lot contributes another step in the right direction.
The store teamed with local clinic staff to place stickers on healthy foods. Aisles of fresh produce and meats provide variety and selection. Bananas, pears and oranges form an almost rainbow-like array of juicy ripe fruits. Sweet crispy apples can be found piled high upon the shelves and—paired with peanut butter—offer a healthy alternative to corner store snacks.
The entire community supports the new store as a beacon of hope, marking an optimistic start to a healthier future, and it is new developments like this that Adams commends.
“It’s not just one thing that is going to make the needle change. It’s multiple things at multiple layers,” she says. “So starting with individual change and going all the way to the community.” The Menominee Nation is an excellent example of an involved community working towards its ultimate goal of healthier children, healthier families and a healthier reservation community at large.
