Get better health benefits from home-coooked meals

The countertops are spotless. The floors polished. All the equipment has its place in the cabinets.

This is Peggy Hausheer’s kitchen, the place where she devised recipe after recipe for a cookbook that has helped thousands of people eat healthier.

“Don’t let the looks fool you,” Hausheer said. “This is a working kitchen.”

A couple weeks ago, Hausheer retired as executive director of Nutra-Net. Along with a team of home economists and dietitians, Hausheer helped create the non-profit organization that turns 25 years old this year.

The cookbook, called “Whiz, Zip and Zap It” has been the foundation of the organization’s mission to make cooking fun and easy and healthy for all families.   

Nutra-Net’s name comes from the two fundamentals of the organization: nutrition coupled with networking.

“I really enjoyed it,” Hausheer said of her time as leader of Nutra-Net. “I loved working with people.”

Nutra-Net started when the professionals came together to develop nutrition lessons for low-income families.

She served on the Community Services League board. She saw people who received food but didn’t know how to prepare it. 

They had basic ingredients to make homemade meals. But they lacked information on how to use the ingredients.

Hausheer, a home economist, and about 39 other health professional like dietitians, teachers, and nurses led classes to teach the people who were receiving food.

“We used to go out to all the food pantries, the hospitals and give these demonstrations,” she said. “We decided to develop a program that would get them engaged and involved.”

Hausheer worked tirelessly to build the organization. Now, she’s taking a break but still works once a week for Nutra-Net.

Lisa Medrow, a dietitian with the organization, is the new executive director. There’s also two other staffers who work part-time.

“I look forward to still working closely with Peggy,” Medrow said.

Nutra-Net in recent years has turned the spotlight on childhood obesity, a problem health experts say is reaching epidemic levels.

“When we first started, nutrition was a very hard sell,” Hausheer said. “No one thought there was a problem.”

In 1997, Nutra-Net published two curricula for children – “Storytime Cooks” and “Whiz, Zip, & Zap It!”

The books are easy to follow, with no more than four ingredients. “Look here, there’s fruit kabobs that a 3-year-old can do,” she said, flipping through the cookbook. The criteria for all our recipes is they have to be simple, fast, and easy to prepare using very basic foods and little equipment,” she said. “It must taste good, look good and (be) nutritious.”

If kids make the food, they’re more likely to try and like it. “When they have ownership, they eat it,” Hausheer said.

In the last three years, Nutra-Net has installed the Teen Health Mentor program where teens teach kids to prepare healthy foods.

 The teens get an eight-hour training course by Nutra-Net. Then they go to elementary schools and teach kids how to prepare healthy snacks.

Teenagers are notorious for poor eating habits, Hausheer said. But when they teach a child about smarter food choices, they take task seriously. This helps the teens and kids make better eating choices.

Kids are consuming too much refined, processed sugar.

In the last two years, more than 21,000 kids have experienced Nutra-Net’s programs.

“The kids now are more savvy about nutrition,” Hausheer said. “There’s been a spotlight on the obesity problem. The word has gotten around.”

The children's curricula have been awarded the prestigious Nutrition Action Award by the (International) Society for Nutrition Education, and were recognized by the Missouri Department of Health as “Effective in Cardiovascular Risk Reduction Among Minority Populations.”

Medrow said the organization is currently working on publishing a revised edition of the Whiz cookbook.

The Nutra-Net program does not categorize foods as good or bad. A variety of all foods, Hausheer said, are good in moderation.

But Hausheer, like all health experts, pushes the consumption of fruits and veggies.

Hausheer emphasizes limiting the number of visits to restaurants. “In order to make it taste good, they (restaurants) salt it a great deal and they use more fat in frying.”

Through education, Nutra-Net focuses on homemade meals where you can control the level of sodium in foods.

Nutra-Net also distributes information to seniors about healthy eating. The organization has published a book called “Recipes and Reminiscent” where they take old fashioned recipes and scale down the foods.