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How to Revolutionize Our Food System for Greater Nourishment
Dr. Steve Greenspan, Sara Sherman, and Dr. Rod Wallace
How do we re-build a food system to consistently nourish us?
Consider how we can solve problems in the developmentally disabled (DD) community, where professional staff frequently fail to ensure healthy diets.
Joint research with Steve Greenspan and Sara Sherman:
It’s easy to predict what will happen when immediate food desires are rewarded:
“Mac and cheese pizza!” Rod’s five-year old son, Reuben, requests, eyes sparkling. “Those are my favorite foods, and I want them together on my birthday.”
I laugh because the concept ‘macaroni pizza’ is absurd. And while Reuben does receive both foods on his special day, they are served separately.
Unfortunately, far too many Americans ingest an unhealthy combination of ingredients, and it’s more than once a year. The resulting obesity and other health damage decreases quality of life and lifespan.
We have more than enough technology. nutritionists, dieticians, and food technologists develop an ever-expanding array of understanding and know-how. Enter a supermarket and you’ll find over 40,000 different foods.
But those foods don’t nourish us.
The problem is applying basic understanding in areas where we’re not experts.
Consider care for adults with developmental disabilities. Professional caregivers develop deep knowledge of their charges’ personalities, preferences, health requirements, and emotional makeup. They may recognize, for example, that Juan dislikes chewy foods because of his trouble swallowing, or that Lisa requires a particular dietary supplement.
Yet too frequently, these deeply knowledgeable professionals struggle to deliver a consistently nourishing diet. Even with support, many individuals with developmental disabilities suffer the health impacts of destructive food intake. Individuals with developmental disabilities in Ohio, for example, are 50% more likely to be obese (43%) and two-thirds more likely to have high blood pressure (42%).
The experts’ challenge is integrating deep knowledge of their charges with basic understanding in other areas. Miscues are caused when Direct Support Professionals (DSPs) misunderstand the purpose of their actions, lack fundamental knowledge, mis-align effort, or fail to address destructive social pressure.
PS: For the full article, click below:
- Purpose
Guidance from governments and mentors only enhances decision-making when the purpose of such advice is clear. By understanding intent, individuals more easily recognize how to interpret advice in a given situation.
Too frequently, we lose common-sense because we’re lost in the weeds.
Services for the person with developmental disability (DD), for example, exist to improve clients’ lives. Rather than an easy life, the practitioner should focus on improving the client’s love, esteem, and fulfillment, as well as their safety and physical needs. These categories, from Maslow’s Hierarchy, are the same as for a person without disabilities.. Only subject to this purpose do rules and regulations to protect DD rights have meaning.
Some DD staff argue, “The person I serve with developmental disabilities is unlikely to have romantic relationships, so it doesn’t matter if they are overweight.” ” Or, “It would be inappropriate to stop my client from eating [unhealthy] frozen pizza every day because it’s their right to choose what they want.”
Wrong. Harming a client’s health violates their right to live well. Failing to provide education and options makes it impossible for them to exercise their rights by making informed choices.
The appropriate challenge is finding ways to integrate client choice into a healthy menu. Adults with DD can select which fruit and vegetable to include in their meal, for example.
In service to making life better, support staff’s ambition with respect to food is to support a healthy diet. To impact decision-making, this purpose must have meaning to practitioners. In Sara’s experience training DD staff, most students initially struggle to complete a meal menu with blanks for each food group. In such an environment, cutting-edge nutritional research and opinion solely add confusion.
Similarly adding confusion is discussion of so-called corner-situations in which the goals of healthy diet and improving life clash. Such cases are rare.
In other words, the first key ingredient is clarity about what we’re trying to accomplish.
- Fundamental Knowledge
Helping adults with developmental disabilities understand and choose healthy diets requires basic toolboxes focused on food, supporting adults with disabilities, and structuring lives.
Staff need to support individuals to procure and prepare healthy food on a tight budget. They must:
- Recognize a good healthy-food value, despite many college graduates inability to interpret a simple table such as on a food label. Many DSPs do not have a strong history of making healthy food choices for themselves.
- Transport food home, despite 14 million Americans (~4%) lacking access to grocery stores.
- Prepare food, despite one-in-five adults reportedly unable to even boil an egg.
The DSP must support adults with disabilities through menu decisions, including:
- Engaging individuals in constructive healthy-food selection.
- Managing disappointment and confusion in a manner than doesn’t trigger harmful behavior, and
- Constructively replace sugary, stimulating snacks with healthier alternatives.
And the professional must be able to structure their own lives to:
- Provide the regularly scheduled meals that are natural opportunities for healthy food consumption.
- Provide time to prepare healthy food. Loading a family into a car and heading to the local restaurant may, in the end, take as much time as a home-cooked meal. However, we frequently slip into the mindset that eating out is simpler.
In short, the second key ingredient is basic DSP knowledge about healthy food and successful DD living.
- Addressing Social Pressure
We all live in society, those with disabilities and the non-disabled alike. And our ever-changing cultural environment shifts the most appropriate food strategy. A constructive brand’s marketing messages, for example, may allow a DSP to use a commercial to deliver a healthy message . . . until that message is changed in a later commercial to an unhealthy one.
The messages we receive about health are as confusing as on other topics. For instance, we must avoid guilt when our bodies don’t match the erotic enticement of the gorgeous people we see on TV. At the same time, we must also avoid the pandering concept that every negative thought about our bodies is shaming. Searching for the healthy version of ourselves is a positive endeavor.
Some adults with developmentally disabilities may not be directly exposed to such confusion. However, their DSP’s are– and the person with disabilities relies on the non-disabled’s guidance. Appropriate coaching takes into account these changing pressures.
- Aligned Effort
Each element of this recipe for success is reasonably straightforward when considered alone. Boiling an egg, for example, takes two ingredients (including water) and ten minutes. Teaching a DSP to cook eggs truly is easy. And the list above is similar to existing, quality guidance.
Yet supporting healthy eating is challenging. This effort is like designing a watch. Only if all of the pieces are there and effectively coordinated do you get the desired outcome.
Many say, “Give a man a fish and feed him for a day. Teach him to fish and feed him for life.”
But that saying is incorrect.
You should say, “Teach a person to cost-effectively procure a fish, . . .
And you must also teach that person to prepare the fish, convince their family to eat it, and have a regular mealtime at which to serve it.
Otherwise, you have a money-wasting piece of smelly, rotting flesh.
The fourth ingredient is aligned effort. To ensure a healthy lifestyle, all elements of Purpose, Fundamental Knowledge, and Addressing Social Pressure must be successfully delivered, simultaneously.
In short, healthier eating for persons with developmentally disabilities requires four elements.
- Professionals must understand the purpose of their overall roles and of their food guidance, to avoid confusion.
- To successfully design a life featuring nourishing food, they must have a working knowledge of fundamental elements of food and its preparation, as well as how to safely collaborate with adults with disabilities.
- Execution of the approach must successfully address social pressures.
- And all elements must be successfully integrated.
This description focuses on nourishing those with developmentally disabilities. However, there are similar challenges in several other areas of DSP coaching, such as employment and healthcare.
And research by Steve and Rod with advice from a Nobel Prize winner is uncovering multiple faults with similar characteristics across the food supply chain.
When our food nourishes us, the value created is immense. Quality of life improves. People are healthier. Diabetes, cardiopulmonary ailments, and cancer falls. Life expectancy increases. Developing business and social models that deliver such value can be well worth the effort.
However, the technology, itself, isn’t the key. We have more than enough capability to deliver any society we want.
People solve problems, and we solve them most effectively when we work together.
Rod
Dr. Rod Wallace is an economist, consultant, and speaker who helps businesses make more money by solving society’s problems. A Fulbright Fellow, he has led multi-organization billion-dollar initiatives worldwide and partnered with a Silicon Valley pioneer to explore the impact of Artificial Intelligence on society.
Rod speaks about how to integrate social responsibility into business to maximize profit and purpose. He highlights digital technology’s impact on society and the strategies and tools with which business can solve our big, systemic problems.
Contact Rod at info@RodWallacePhD.com.