The Pike County Cooperative Extension Service’s Expanded Food and Nutrition Education Program collaborated with WestCare, a residental substance and addiction treatment center to offer the Healthy Choices for Everybody curriculum. The center specializes in helping people traditionally considered difficult to treat. Many of these clients haven’t been taught about nutrition. Many have abused their bodies with drug or alcohol use and want to improve their lives.
The Healthy Choices for Everybody curriculum was taught to the clients in WestCare. These clients were engaged in how to plan meals with portion control in mind. They learned how and why we need to read nutrition labels and how to eat healthy on a budget. We covered lessons on food safety and knowing the limits on empty calories. They also learned about the importance of eating breakfast and exercising.

One hundred percent of the seventeen men who entered the program graduated. Eighty-six percent improved their diet quality such as preparing food without salt and deciding on healthy food choices for their family. Ninety percent improved on physical activity, sixty-eight percent improved on food safety such as washing their hands more, using a meat thermometer and not thawing foods on the counter. Eighty- three percent improved on food resource management such as making a grocery list, planning meals, and comparing food more often using the nutrition label.

The clients wrote the following statements: “I did not know the ill effects that fats, sugar, and salt can have on your health.  I didn’t understand how food could do so much harm. “I learned that the portions I have been used to eating were way too large and my meals were not balanced with all the food groups”.