Diet and Mental Health

A recent article in the TES has got us thinking about how our mental health is affected by the food we eat. We know that eating processed food that is high in salt and sugar and lacking in nutrients is bad for our physical health, but could it also be detrimental to our mental wellbeing?

Caring Cooks is dedicated to improving the wellbeing of young people in Jersey, and as such, our interest lies primarily in the health of children. With as many as 1 in 5 young people experiencing mental health problems, and suicide being the most common cause of deaths in the under 35s, we need to understand how to support these young people who are experiencing mental health difficulties. Is this a problem that could be tackled in the same way as obesity?

Studies certainly suggest that eating the recommended amount of fruit and vegetables, as well as unprocessed whole grains can help to reduce the effects of depression, in contrast to a diet lacking in fruit and veg and consisting mainly of processed food. Research also indicates that children who have a good diet experience higher self esteem and have fewer emotional problems. Science seems a little unsure exactly why this is the case – it could be a direct result of consuming the important vitamins or minerals or be a causal effect of better sleep and a body that is working optimally.

Either way, it seems that a good diet is key to good mental health. However, sharing this information does not necessarily lead to behaviour change. If families and young people are unable to afford fresh fruit and veg, as is the case for 44% respondents in the recent Jersey Lifestyle Survey then they are unlikely to consume it. A further 14% of respondents stated that they didn’t feel they had the skills they needed to cook from scratch and 11% wouldn’t know what to cook to make a healthy meal.

Here at Caring Cooks we are fans of the old adage “Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime”. We know it is important to give people the information they need to understand how to be healthy, but without the skills to help themselves, they are unlikely to succeed. That is why we use our programmes to educate and inspire young people to learn basic skills. They begin to understand how food is grown in our kitchen gardens, how to perform simple cooking techniques in our Let’s Get Cooking programme and learn how to enjoy a wide variety of nutritious food in a communal environment thanks to our school lunch programme, Flourish.

If eating well is the key to tackling mental health problems then we feel confident that our work can go some way to preventing poor mental health in the future.

Small but Mighty in 2019

Caring Cooks is a small charity, and, in many ways, we like it like that. The team is small enough that it feels more like a family and the office has a cosy, intimate atmosphere.

However, being a small charity has its own set of challenges. It can be difficult to secure sources of funding when you don’t have the big profile of some of the larger, more well known charities, and this unpredictability of funding has the potential to leave us vulnerable. Running a small charity in Jersey is particularly challenging as there is so much competition for funding with the presence of almost 300 hundred charities on an Island which has a population of just over 100,000.

The great news is that despite these challenges, Caring Cooks have had an amazing year. We have grown and we plan to continue growing! We are so proud that against all the odds, we have achieved some incredible things in 2019:

We have supported 50 adults and 70 children across 47 families who are experiencing challenging times, illness or the loss of family members, through our Weekly Meal Service.
We have taught 1,289 children basic cookery skills, the fundamentals of nutrition and extended this learning across numeracy, literacy, geography and history through our Let’s Get Cooking Programme.
We have grown vegetables with our schools through the Kitchen Garden Project which have then been used to prepare a range of dishes in school.
We have prepared, cooked and served nearly 14,000 nutritious school meals in just 3 months, for the first time ever in Jersey, to primary school children through our pioneering Flourish programme.
We have appointed two new and very well respected individuals to our Board, Garry Toy and Yvonne Corbin, who bring the expertise and knowledge we need as an organisation to be able to start scaling up Caring Cooks and it’s successful evidence based programmes to more children and young people in Jersey.

Our achievements are thanks to our loyal volunteers and fundraisers, an awesome team and a CEO with an incomparable passion for inspiring and implementing generational behaviour change on the Island of Jersey. Special mentions as well to the Government of Jersey and some wonderful corporate sponsorship.

Thank you to everyone who came along on the Caring Cooks journey in 2019!

Thinking ahead to next year we have some even more ambitious plans but to fulfil our ambitions we need your help! We need more fundraisers and volunteers than ever before to continue on this upward trajectory. Can you help?

Bring it on 2020, we’re ready for you!

National School Meals Week

This week is National School Meals week, a celebration focused on the importance of school meals. Whilst the creators of this event, UK based LACA, are celebrating their 30^th year, this is the first time ever that we have been able to join the celebrations in Jersey, making it a special occasion for Caring Cooks. If you have been keeping up to date with the news at Caring Cooks, you will know that the first ever hot school lunches were served in the Island’s state schools this September. We thought that this might be a good time to reflect and remind ourselves of the reasons why school meals are so very important.

We know that only 1 in 4 children will eat the recommended number of fruits and vegetables each day, despite scientific evidence stating the importance of fresh fruit and veg in maintaining a healthy lifestyle. Caring Cooks strive, through our hot school meals programme, to bring a whole range of fruit and vegetables into the diet of Jersey’s schoolchildren. We offer a wide selection of fresh produce in an attempt to get children to try new ingredients and hopefully encourage them to add more variety to their diet; both at school and at home.
Up to 1000 schoolchildren in Jersey may go without a hot meal each day because parents do not have the time, skills or even equipment with which to cook. The school meals service provided by Caring Cooks gives parents peace of mind that whatever their circumstances, their child has eaten a healthy, warm meal at school.
Some families are unable to afford fresh food, as it is more expensive than the unhealthier, processed alternative. It is statistically proven that obesity is an illness which impacts most heavily on low income families in deprived areas. Families on income support can access free school meals which means that no matter how much a family is struggling financially, they can feel confident that their child’s hot lunch has contained fresh, healthy ingredients.
The obesity epidemic is growing. Currently, 1 in 3 children will leave primary school either overweight or with obesity. This is a shocking statistic and a trend which we believe can only be reversed by educating people about food and equipping them with the skills to cook from scratch. We hope that by providing a lunch, cooked from scratch using fresh, local ingredients, and encouraging children to try a variety of new foods, we will go some way to creating healthy habits for the future.
Prior to the launch of the school meals service, Caring Cooks carried out an audit and discovered that 14,745 items of single use plastic are thrown away daily, in Jersey alone, as a result of packed lunches. This is a horrifying amount of rubbish. However, our goal is to bring our hot school lunches to every school in Jersey, thereby minimising the amount of plastic thrown away each day.
It is well known that eating a good lunch stabilises our energy levels and enables us to concentrate better during the afternoon. We aim to give every child the ability to perform the best they can academically by fuelling their afternoon’s learning with a good meal in their tummy.
Above all, we believe that our food is delicious and wholesome and we are grateful for the opportunity to nourish little bodies and minds on their journey to become the happy and healthy generation of tomorrow.

Over 80% of schoolchildren and 90% of parents are delighted with the quality of their school lunch.

Time to Solve Childhood Obesity

On the 10^th October 2019, the Chief Medical Officer, Professor Dame Sally Davies published a report titled “Time to Solve Childhood Obesity”. Caring Cooks have been looking at this report with interest as it chimes with our values and goals. Although the report is written in reference to the UK, the problems faced on the mainland are mirrored here in Jersey. The objective of Caring Cooks is to support, educate, inspire and nourish children, and their families, to give local children the healthiest possible start in life. The report revealed why this is such a crucial task and we feel, lends legitimacy to the ways in which we are tackling the obesity crisis at a local level.

The UK Government has an ambition to half childhood obesity by 2030, and yet currently there are double the amount of overweight and obese children than there were 30 years ago. Today, in a class of 30 children, on average, 10 of those children will be overweight or obese. Something drastic needs to change if we are to turn the tide on this epidemic.

What do we know?

Childhood obesity disproportionately affects children living in deprived areas and certain ethnic minority groups. In fact, if the current trend continues, 1 in 3 children in the most deprived areas will be obese by 2030 – making this a bigger challenge than ever.
Children often do not have enough opportunities to be active – to run, cycle, swim and climb.
Children are exposed to a vast array of unhealthy food and drink choices, larger portion sizes, junk food advertising and shelves full of unhealthy food that is cheaper than fruit and vegetables.

What does this mean for children?

Many overweight and obese children suffer from type 2 diabetes, asthma, musculoskeletal pain and mental health issues.
The long term impact is that obesity can be life shortening and can vastly reduce an individual’s quality of life and earning potential.
The year 2000 saw the first cases of type 2 diabetes in children, which previously had been an adult disease. Children who have type 2 diabetes also suffer a higher incidence of complications.
Tooth decay is a major problem for children who are exposed to diets high in sugar and processed food. In 2017/18 – 38,385 children underwent a general anaesthetic for dental surgery to extract rotten teeth in the UK.

As well as the personal consequences for individuals, there is an economic consequence to society as a whole. Today’s children are the workforce of tomorrow so it benefits everybody to ensure that they grow up to be healthy and productive in order to ensure a prosperous future for the UK, and of course Jersey.

What can Caring Cooks do about this?

Professor Dame Sally Davies recommends that children spend more time outside in environments that allow them to be active and healthy. We provide this in the form of kitchen gardens in schools which allow children to appreciate the great outdoors and begin to learn the skills they need to grow their own food.

We believe that eating well starts with the ability to be able to cook your own food from scratch. Our Let’s Get Cooking programme gives children the skills to do this and to understand the basic fundamentals of nutrition.

The report also states the importance of providing good nutrition in schools, as children spend so much of their time in educational institutions. Our Flourish programme provides children with the opportunity to eat a healthy meal every lunchtime, if parents wish them to do so.

Caring Cooks are doing as much as our funding will allow but we want to do more. This report highlights the crucial importance of taking action now in order to ensure a healthier and happier future for Jersey’s children. If you would like to support us by volunteering or donating then please get in touch. We are grateful for any help you can offer. If you work for a large organisation then you can help by suggesting that they support Caring Cooks via their CSR policy. There’s lots you can do, speak to us today to find out more.

Hot lunches: helping Jersey’s schoolchildren to flourish

Welcome to Flourish

We are so proud to introduce Flourish, our pioneering new lunch programme, delivering hot school meals to the schoolchildren of Jersey for the first time ever.

Flourish is the brain child of Caring Cook’s founder and Chief Executive, Melissa Nobrega. Statistics show that as many as 1000 children in Jersey may go without a hot meal every single day due to lack of money or facilities within which to cook. Providing hot meals in schools has been a long time dream of Melissa’s but the process began in earnest over two years ago, when Melissa approached the Government of Jersey to ask for financial support. Since then, Melissa and her team have worked tirelessly to make her dream a reality. On September 4^th this year, the first meals were served in Samares school and received a fantastic response from both children, who provided feedback using tokens in a happy or sad face voting box, and parents who shared their delight on Facebook. It was a similar story at Janvrin school the following day as more eager schoolchildren sat down to their first ever hot school meal.

A happy student enjoying chocolate bean chilli and homemade flatbread 🙂

What is Flourish?

Flourish is an ambitious project that seeks to offer hot meals to every school child in Jersey. Hot school lunches have never before been offered by the Island’s schools, we believe to the detriment of children who do not always receive the nutrition they need to concentrate during afternoon lessons, and to the chagrin of parents who are required to make a packed lunch every day, which is both costly and time consuming. There is also a significant environmental impact caused by pack lunches which are often crammed full of single use plastic. A recent experiment conducted in a local school showed that as many as 14, 745 items of single use plastic are thrown away in Jersey every single day as a result of packed lunches.

We are so grateful to the Government of Jersey for believing in our proposal and for supporting us both financially and administratively. Thanks to the Government grant of £200,000 we have been able to fit out our two pilot schools with the equipment necessary to serve the food and are able to run the pilot for two years. The dream is to demonstrate how well our model works, and to roll out the hot lunches to every single school in Jersey.

How does it work?

Our team serving up a roast chicken dinner

Due to the fact that schools in Jersey are not equipped with catering kitchens, Caring Cooks work from a satellite kitchen and deliver meals to our two pilot schools each day. The food is cooked from scratch on a daily basis by our Head Chef, Sarah Copp and her team. Sarah has worked in Michelin Star kitchens and is the proud owner of her own, highly popular, street food van ‘The Chugging Pig’. We are extremely lucky that she has chosen to come and work for us and is as passionate about providing good food to the children of Jersey as the rest of us are.

Once the food is delivered into schools, our enthusiastic team of lunchtime supervisors serve it up to the hungry children.

What food do we serve?

The food we serve is wholesome and nutritionally balanced to ensure the right proportions of protein, dairy, carbohydrates, fruit and veg. We cook everything from scratch using whole foods so we can guarantee no nasties! We have worked closely with the Government dietician who has carefully analysed and approved our menus so that parents can have full confidence that their children are being fed well. We also use an allergy matrix to ensure that every child can be accommodated no matter what their individual needs. We offer a vegetarian option every day of the week and two days of the week, we offer a fully meat free menu.

What does the future hold?

In our two pilot schools we have the potential to serve as many as 700 children each and every day, our next task is to sign up as many parents as possible. We feel confident that once parents see how enthusiastic the children are about the food, they will be keen to join us. The school meals cost £2.50 each day, unless the child is entitled to free school meals. In this case there is no cost whatsoever to the family.

Following the launch of Flourish we have had interest from parents of children attending other schools on the Island. We are keen to garner the support of headteachers so that we can work towards the possibility of rolling out this project to any child who wants a hot meal at lunchtime over the coming years. We are overwhelmed by the support we have received so far and are delighted to report a really positive start to Flourish. However, in order enable us to share the lunches far and wide, we need to win support and financial backing to allow us to continue. If your organisation would be interested in offering help to enable us to continue on our journey to feed healthy lunches to the schoolchildren of Jersey then we’d love to hear from you.

Who Gives a Fork?

Here at Caring Cooks we are always looking for new and innovative ways to engage our supporters and raise funds. We are currently in the process of launching a unique new project to raise much needed funds for our projects. There are many charities competing for funding on our small Island, so we have been thinking outside the box to come up with a pioneering new way to fund our valuable work. Our ethos is to improve the health of children of Jersey by educating them and supporting families to eat healthy and nutritious food. Therefore, what better outlet to tap into to raise money then the hospitality industry?

Our exciting new initiative ‘Who Gives a Fork?’, seeks to work with local restaurants, cafes and hotels to embrace the synergy between us and them. They provide delicious, home cooked food to their customers, whilst we work to give children and their families the opportunity to enjoy the same experience at home, in the community and at school.

Who Gives a Fork is innovative, yet simple. Our hospitality partners are given marketing materials, supplied by ourselves and generously sponsored by Le Masurier and Waitrose, which they display on their tables. Then, at the end of their meal, diners are asked whether they would like to make a discretionary donation of £1. Thanks to the help of our sponsors in meeting the set up costs, the money raised can be ploughed directly back into our programmes. This campaign will run between October and December each year and has the potential to raise a large amount of money that is invaluable in helping us to continue offering our services and running our projects.

In return, we will be offering to market and promote the participating restaurants using our social media outlets. We can display menus, advertise Christmas events and share any promotional activities. Not only does the initiative benefit us at Caring Cooks but it is a fantastic PR opportunity for our hospitality partners.

We are appealing to the restauranteurs, café owners and hoteliers of Jersey to join us in the campaign. We want to work together to give the children of Jersey a brighter and healthier future. #WGAF

If you are interested in becoming involved in this unique and mutually beneficial opportunity then please contact us at info@caringcooksofjersey.com, on 01534 710917, or via our Facebook page

Who Gives a Fork?

We are appealing to the restauranteurs, café owners and hoteliers of Jersey to join us in the campaign. We want to work together to give the children of Jersey a brighter and healthier future. #WGAF

If you are interested in becoming involved in this unique and mutually beneficial opportunity then please contact us at info@caringcooksofjersey.com, on 01534 710917, or via our Facebook page

Happy Birthday Caring Cooks

To celebrate 5 glorious years of Caring Cooks, we would like to share a little recap on our proud achievements to date. Since our humble beginnings in 2014 we have worked hard and faced a steep learning curve but have managed to help numerous vulnerable families and eager to learn children from all over the Island.

Caring Cooks is now a registered Jersey charity and Non-Profit Organisation with a clear mission – to empower children and young people in Jersey to grow, cook and eat healthy food in childhood and beyond, by educating, inspiring and supporting them and their families.

How it all began

Caring Cooks was founded in February 2014 after Melissa Nobrega, our CEO and founder, offered to cook a weekly meal for a family who were struggling, either financially or because of ill health. This gesture enabled them to sit down together to eat a nutritious, home cooked meal and spend quality time with each other, without the stress of preparing a meal.

Weekly Meal Service

It soon became clear that there were many vulnerable families in Jersey who were struggling to feed their children with home cooked meals, and as other volunteers offered to help, the Weekly Meal Service was born. Designed as ‘a relief not a reliance’ the weekly meal service is still going strong, providing families with a meal delivered to their home on a Saturday for a period of six weeks whilst they get back on their feet. The weekly meal service is cooked and delivered by our chef and a team of dedicated volunteers, without whom we wouldn’t be able to offer this service.

Kitchen Garden Project

Our wonderful kitchen garden at Samares school

Following on from the Weekly Meal Service, our charity has gone from strength to strength. The Kitchen Garden Project was launched in February 2016, which sought to create a natural space in schools for children to learn about planting food. In the kitchen gardens, children are provided with an opportunity to watch food grow and then harvest it to cook with and finally, eat. We believe that making this connection between the growing and eating of food helps to nurture in children an understanding of natural and healthy food, and the importance of this in their diet. Our beautiful kitchen garden at Samares school was created with the help of Santander volunteers, which provided them with an opportunity to give something back to the community and gave us access to the resources we needed to turn our dreams of a fully functioning kitchen garden into reality.

Let’s Get Cooking

A natural successor to the Kitchen Garden Project was the Let’s Get Cooking Programme in April 2017. Let’s Get Cooking seeks to nurture a love of food and cooking in young people as well as equipping them with the essential skills necessary to cook healthy meals. Our Let’s Get Cooking initiative delivers a cross curricular, progressive skills based programme across a number of schools in Jersey and has been highly praised by both teaching staff and parents, as well as the children themselves. Beginning in year one, children spend their primary years learning increasingly complex skills, culminating in an enhanced knowledge of cookery and healthy eating by the time they begin secondary school. We are taking on yet another school this year, meaning that over a quarter of all schoolchildren in Jersey will be given the opportunity to develop these skills. Our ambition doesn’t stop there, we hope to have every primary school in Jersey on board by 2015.

Flourish

Our latest venture, in association with the Government of Jersey, is the pioneering Flourish initiative, which will bring hot lunches into two pilot schools as of September 2019, in a scheme that offers something never before achieved in Jersey. We look forward to rolling this out to many more schools in the coming years.

Thank you

We have come a long way, but we could not have achieved as much as we have without the amazing people of Jersey who have volunteered time, money and services to our cause. Thank you so much to everyone who has joined us on our journey. If you would like to get involved we’d love to hear from you, there are many more plans afoot and lots more that we want to achieve.

hello@caringcooksofjersey.com

Home

What is processed food and why should we avoid it?

We are told on a regular basis that processed food is bad for us, and cooking from scratch is better for our health but do we really understand why that is? Also, do we truly understand the difference between processed food and a whole food? Here at Caring Cooks we believe that the key to better health is empowering people with the knowledge and skills they need to eat better. It is therefore crucial that we all understand the difference between the foods that can help us and the foods that can harm us.

Whole foods

An unprocessed, or whole food, is probably the easiest concept to explain. It is a product that has not been changed in any way – it reaches our plates in a relatively untouched state. This can include whole fruit and vegetables, unprocessed meat for example a chicken breast or steak, lentils, seeds, grains, eggs and brown rice. We consider these foods to be optimally healthy – there are no added ingredients, just produce in its natural state.

Processed food

Interestingly, processed food is not all bad! Processing methods include freezing, canning and baking – all of which may be necessary to preserve a foodstuff. Some foods need to be processed in order to make them edible, or safe. Consider olive oil for example, the olives go through a pressing process to produce olive oil, and milk goes through a pasteurisation process to make it safe to drink. Not everything in a packet is necessarily bad for us- cheese, bread, canned and smoked fish and tofu have all been ‘processed’ to turn them into something that we can eat and enjoy. These are all foods that offer health benefits and can contribute to a healthy diet.

Ultra-processed food

When we talk about processed food being unhealthy, we are usually referring to ‘ultra-processed’ items. Ultra processed food often involves the addition of industrial substances and chemical sensory enhancers such as sweeteners, flavourings and colourings. It also tends to be higher in sugar, salt and saturated fat. Ultra processed foods include breakfast cereals, instant soups, fizzy drinks, chicken nuggets, burgers, shop bought cakes, chocolate products and ready meals to name a few.

These types of ultra processed foods make up 50% of the average diet in the UK and there are good reasons for this. Ultra processed food is scientifically manipulated to taste good! The addition of salt, sugar and fat makes it an attractive proposition to our taste buds. It is also often shelf stable and long lasting, cheap, well marketed and easy and convenient to consume.

Unfortunately, ultra processed food also increases our risk of heart attack, high blood pressure, stroke, obesity and even some types of cancer. Therefore, scientists are imploring us to return to more basic diets which include whole and minimally processed foods made using ingredients that our grandmothers would recognise. If you are unsure whether a product is highly processed it is often easy to tell by the label. If an item contains ingredients that you don’t recognise, and perhaps can’t even pronounce, then it is probably an industrial ingredient that is not beneficial to your health.

In the News

Ultra processed food hit the headlines again last week following a Spanish study which suggested that people who ate more than four portions of ultra processed food a day were 62% more likely to die early. Similar studies also showed that consuming highly processed food encourages us to eat more. These studies suggest that those of us who eat this type of diet are likely to eat on average 500 calories more per day, and as a result put on weight.

This indicates that processed food increases our desire to eat more – possibly due to the fact that it alters our hunger hormones, or perhaps because it takes longer for us to feel full and so we continue to eat beyond the point when we have consumed enough.

Whatever the exact scientific reason for this alteration in appetite and increased risk to health, it is clear that consuming too much ultra processed food is detrimental to our wellbeing. It can however be very difficult for us to choose alternatives, as healthier foods are often more expensive and require more skill when it comes to preparation. This is why Caring Cooks are committed to educating children from a young age how to cook simple, nutritious meals from scratch. A savvy cook, equipped with the necessary skills has a greater ability to cook delicious, healthy food from wholesome and cheap ingredients.

Children on our Let’s Get Cooking programme in Jersey

References:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-48280772

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2019/may/29/studies-link-too-much-heavily-processed-food-to-early-death

https://www.nhs.uk/live-well/eat-well/what-are-processed-foods/

What is the secret of success in Leeds?

The city of Leeds has been in the news recently due to their huge success in reducing levels of childhood obesity. Childhood obesity is a growing problem all over the world and yet successful programmes to reverse the trend have only been seen in Amsterdam and Leeds. Following a report that Leeds had managed to reduce childhood obesity, a conversation opened up about how they had achieved this and how other cities could replicate their success.

Although Jersey is separate to the UK, we cannot ignore the fact that children in Jersey are struggling with similar levels of obesity as they are in the UK. The sad fact is that one in three 11 year olds will leave primary school either overweight or obese, and the majority of these children will remain obese into adulthood. This obesity brings with it a range of health problems including an increased risk of type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease, stroke and reduced life expectancy. Individuals who are obese are also more likely to suffer from low self-esteem and even social discrimination.

What is the cause of childhood obesity?

In order to develop ways in which we can begin to combat childhood obesity, it is important to understand what actually causes it. Essentially, obesity is a lifestyle disease which is caused in most cases by eating more calories than the body can expend. This tendency to consume an excessive amount of calories is encouraged by the huge variety of processed foods that are easily and cheaply available. Processed food tends to be higher in fat and sugar than a home-cooked alternative. This trend towards overeating has come at a time when our lifestyles have become more sedentary. We are more likely to use a car rather than walking or cycling, and to watch TV or use electronic devices to relax rather than exercising. It is in effect a perfect storm from which obesity is flourishing.

How is Leeds combating this problem?

Studies show that it is crucial to encourage children into good habits from an early age as once obesity has taken hold, it is difficult to reverse. Studies also show that interventions work less well once children reach the end of primary school. Leeds City Council have therefore been working with a charity called Henry, who focus on some of the youngest children, in the poorest families to educate on the importance of health, exercise and nutrition. The Henry programme focuses on boundary setting and an authoritative rather than authoritarian style of parenting. For example, instead of insisting that a child eats all their vegetables before leaving the table, the child is given a choice about which vegetables they would prefer, perhaps peas or broccoli. This extends to all aspects of parenting. A parent may also for example ask a child whether they would like to turn off their own device or have a parent turn it off for them, rather than just insisting that they switch it off at once. When it comes to exercise, a child may be asked where they would like to walk to, or perhaps whether they would like to walk or cycle. The Henry project works on the basis that it is crucial to set boundaries regarding exercise and nutrition but it is also important to give the child a choice as to how they engage, encouraging them to take control and make their own good choices about healthy habits. The project also supports parents to learn about boundary setting and equips them with skills which will empower them and give them the confidence to make good, healthy choices.

Whilst there is no cold, hard evidence that the Henry Project is the defining catalyst for a reduction in child obesity figures from 9.4% to 8.8% in Leeds, the ethos of Henry makes a lot of sense and could be beneficial to a wider audience if it was rolled out elsewhere, perhaps even here in Jersey.

Let’s get cooking

Here at Caring Cooks we fully support the ethos of empowering both parents and children with the skills and knowledge they require to cook healthy meals. That is why we set up our Let’s Get Cooking programme. Our Let’s Get Cooking programme helps children to learn about different types of food, encourages them to try a variety of ingredients and teaches them how to prepare a selection of meals. Children also take home a file of healthy recipes that they can make with their family at home. Telling people what to do is unlikely to have the impact that we so desperately need unless we equip families with the knowledge, confidence and skills they need to make healthier choices.