Eat, Pray, Love

The Gilliams didn’t particularly enjoy eating out every night; they just felt they had no other choice. Both Greg Gilliam, a pastor in Independence, Mo., and his wife Chris, a clerical assistant, work full time. Chris’ daughter Samantha, 18, and the couple’s daughter Abigail, 6, are busy all day with school and extracurricular activities, not to mention the church functions that the family attends three times a week. Their collective schedule left little time for food-shopping, let alone preparing meals at home. “By the time we came home, it would be late, and we knew that eating late wasn’t healthy,” says Chris. “So [dinners were] fast food because there wasn’t time to cook a meal.”

The Gilliams are not the only family stuck in a fast-food rut. For even the most well-intentioned working parents, having the will to eat right doesn’t necessarily mean being able to find a way to do so. Everyday life–in the form of work, school and other activities–always seems to get in the way. In fact, recent studies show that one of the most important factors that determine how healthily, or unhealthily, Americans eat is workplace demands. And when parents start taking nutritional shortcuts for the sake of their schedules, their children are more likely to do the same.

In a recent study of 50 low- and middle-income working moms and dads, for instance, researchers at Cornell University found that only 40% of mothers said they had time to cook a meal at home five or more days a week. More than half the parents in the survey admitted that in order to accommodate their work hours, they ate in the car, opted for quick-fix solutions like frozen dinners, bought take-out meals on the way home or skipped meals instead of cooking. Some chose not to clock out–and give up wages–for a meal break. “There are some people for whom the structure at work does not allow them to eat the way we recommend,” says Carol Devine, a professor of nutritional sciences at Cornell and an author of the study. “We are not going to fix all of our obesity problems simply by telling people to eat more fruits and vegetables.”

In part, then, it’s up to employers to help their workforce stay healthy. Giving hourly-shift workers more paid breaks often helps, as does installing a central pantry area where workers can refrigerate and heat food brought from home. Some employers, like Dow Chemical, have started to address these challenges and are working to encourage their employees to eat better–by stocking more nutritious snacks in the vending machine and by ensuring that senior management recognize and reward healthy habits among workers. To help employers continue to promote these choices, the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute is now funding studies to further investigate how work environments affect diet and what conditions need to change before working parents start eating healthier.

But offices and factories aren’t the only places where eating habits can go awry. Experts are realizing that it takes the collaboration of an entire community–from employers to school districts to food retailers–to help families learn to cook and eat healthy meals at home instead of getting dinner handed to them through a car window. “It’s not just about telling people what they should do, but making it easier for them to do it,” says Dr. David Katz, director and co-founder of the Yale University Prevention Research Center.

Such a convergence of education and opportunity is already happening in Independence, where the Gilliams live. As part of an innovative program in low-income neighborhoods, the city school district began hosting weekly dinners for students and their families, paid for with federal funds from the Child and Adult Care Food Program. Families get a free hot meal and a cooking demonstration that shows them how to prepare similarly well-balanced entrées at home. “Part of that initiative is to get children to sit down and eat with their parents, and part of it is to teach families what a healthy dinner is,” says Jim Hinson, superintendent of the Independence School District.

Those lessons will not have much staying power, however, unless they are reinforced both at home and at the store. That’s why Hinson asked local grocers for help. In addition to hosting the weekly dinners, schools teach nutrition in the classroom as part of a program called Nutrition Detectives, which was developed by Katz. As students learn to read and understand labels and identify healthy foods, for example, the nearby grocery store devotes a special section to healthful products, featured along with a Nutrition Detectives logo. On a recent visit to the local supermarket, Greg Gilliam was pleasantly surprised to hear that the store had done one better–by bringing in a nutritionist to advise shoppers on how to whip up tasty, good-for-the-family meals. “If a family sat down with somebody like that, they could find very practical ways to put healthy eating ideas into play,” says Greg.

The idea is to remove as many barriers as possible to eating nutritious meals at home. “People’s lives get the better of them,” says Katz. “But with very little programming, we can try to capture the entire family and engage them to support healthy living.”

It worked for the Gilliams. They learned from their daughter’s school, which had a body mass index screening, that their youngest was leaning toward obesity. Then Greg found out he was prediabetic. So now the Gilliams devote some of the time they used to spend in front of the TV to washing and slicing fruits and vegetables as on-the-go snacks for the next day. “If I buy a cantaloupe, cut it up and bag the pieces, we’ll eat it. Otherwise, it just sits in the fridge,” says Chris. To make meal prep more efficient, after every trip to the grocery store, the family creates a menu of the week’s options by putting them on Post-its on the refrigerator. That way, dinner is simply a matter of deciding which meal to make. “It eliminates the guesswork and some of the stress from mealtime,” says Greg.

Greg and Chris have started another new habit–taking walks in their neighborhood each evening. “If our daughters want to talk about their day and Mom isn’t sitting on the couch,” says Chris, “then they say, ‘I’m coming with you.'” So instead of emulating their parents’ less-than-wholesome eating habits, the girls are now learning from their healthy example. And that’s an idea that makes sense for working parents everywhere.