More than 30 Hollister students spent a week at a unique summer camp that taught them about healthy eating and exercise. The Youth Alliance, in partnership with the American Diabetes Association and Safeway Pharmacy, offered a week-long Health Squad camp at Rancho Park Apartments.
Each day, the kids participated in three sessions of exercise and ate healthy snacks or a healthy lunch, donated by Safeway. The lessons of the week focused on healthy eating, such as a presentation by two Safeway pharmacists on vitamins, or on science, technology, engineering and math.
“A lot of the kids are trying foods for the first time,” said Katrina Valdez, the after-school operations manager for Youth Alliance. “For some it was the first time trying cottage cheese with fruit.”
A Thursday morning presentation by Hannah Sihoe, the Safeway pharmacy manager, and Randa Awad, a pharmacist, focused on what foods campers can eat to get different vitamins.
“When you are thinking about a meal, what do you want to see on your plate?” Awad asked the group of campers and teen leaders. “You should look for a rainbow. It should be colorful and you will have a little bit of everything.”
She and Sihoe explained that different fruits and vegetables have different vitamins, with orange foods and red foods containing vitamins A and C. The students also learned about minerals, such as calcium and other nutrients that come from food such as the folic acid in leafy green foods.
To test the kids on their nutrition knowledge, the presenters divided them into five teams for a jeopardy-style quiz. The teams worked together to come up with the correct answer, from such questions as what unique nutrient is contained in tomatoes (the correct answer was lycopene) to what nutrient helps with making DNA (the correct answer was folic acid.)
After the jeopardy game, the students helped to identify the vitamins in a snack of guacamole and carrots. The guacamole had avocado, garlic, onion, tomato, lemon or lime juice and cilantro for a total of five different vitamins.
“This is our first time working with this age group,” Awad said, of the presentation. “We tried to make it more interactive.”
The focus on health for the Youth Alliance started last year when they put together a team of youth advocates who interviewed community members about their access to healthy foods and opportunities to exercise. From there, the nonprofit connected with the ADA who donated T-shirts, pedometers and other giveaways to the students in the week-long program.
“The first day they were tired,” Valdez said. “For a lot this is the first thing they’ve done all summer.”
Valdez said early on in the camp, the students were asking questions about what people with diabetes can eat and how to prevent the disease.
“They had so many questions,” Valdez said, noting that it was clear that many of the students have a relative or someone they know with diabetes. “I know they are taking this home and it will help the whole family.”
At the end of the week, the students were to receive a recipe book with all the healthy snacks or lunches they had eaten during the week.
As a follow-up to the presentation, the students took a field trip to the Hollister Safeway store, where the pharmacists and Stan Leung, the pharmacy care manager, helped them learn about reading food labels. Leung classified foods as an everyday food or a sometimes food. The kids started in an aisle heavy with candy, crackers and nuts. He showed them how to read the carbohydrate, sugar, fat and fiber content on each label. The kids quickly learned candy and crackers had less nutrients than nuts.
Jasmine Bonilla, who will be a freshman at San Benito High School next year, served as a youth leader for the program. The youth leaders all volunteered their time for the camp.
“I love helping all the kids,” she said.
But she had also learned a few things about nutrition during the week of camp.
“I need to stop eating hot Cheetos and Arizona teas,” she said. “Now when I go to the school, I say, ‘No, don’t get that.’”
Valdez said the Youth Alliance is hoping to expand some of the lessons from the camp into its after-school programs with plans to do another camp in the future.
“The camp has been phenomenal,” Valdez said, adding that Hispanics have a higher rate of diabetes and obesity than other ethnicities. “It is important for these kids because it is common demographically.”
