Happy National Nutrition Month!

March is officially national nutrition month and as a registered dietitian nutritionist—it’s my month to shine!

Founded in 1973 by the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, national nutrition month highlights the importance of making informed food choices and developing sound eating and physical activity habits.

This year’s theme “Fuel for the Future” promotes the idea of eating with sustainability in mind as a tasty way to nourish ourselves and protect the environment. In celebration of my passion for food and nutrition education, I’m sharing some of my favorite resources for sustainable healthy eating.

Oldways: Cultural Food Traditions

One of my favorites that I return to time after time is Oldways: Cultural Food Traditions. Oldways is a non-profit organization helping people rediscover and embrace the healthy, sustainable joys of the “old ways” of shared cultural traditions. What started as primarily a resource for the Mediterranean diet, quickly expanded to include African heritage, Asian, and Latin American cultural eating traditions, with a focus on plant-based eating.

Oldways was also part of the movement to help “de-demonization” healthy fats—olive oil, avocados, tree nuts and peanuts—in a world obsessed by low-fat diets.

While there has been some recent criticism of the highly-ranked Mediterranean diet, which I don’t dispute, Oldways has invested considerable resources into promoting ALL of its traditional heritage diets.

The Blue Zones Project – Live Better, Longer

I fell in love with the Blue Zone project after reading Dan Buettner’s The Blue Zones: Lessons for Living Longer From the People Who’ve Lived the Longest for an undergraduate course. Funded by National Geographic, Dan explored five communities with the highest concentration of centenarians (people living beyond 100 years old) including: Okinawa, Japan; Sardinia, Italy; Nicoya, Costa Rica; Ikaria, Greece, and Loma Linda, California.

His team of researchers found nine shared lifestyle habits, which they dubbed the Power 9. Similar to Oldways, the Blue Zone Project weaves healthy eating recommendations in the context of culture, community, connection and purpose.

Solid Starts: A Baby Food Revolution

While this nutrition resource may seem unaligned with my normal diabetes care and education content, it’s been a total lifesaver with my 11-month old. Thanks to the Solid Starts app, we started baby-led weaning at six-months and haven’t looked back.

If you’re unfamiliar with baby-led weaning, it’s an approach that basically skips the whole “force-feed your kid purees” stage. Instead, you offer soft finger foods to allow your baby to self-feed at his own pace. Sometimes they eat, other times they don’t, but overall it allows more independence, better self-regulation, and less meal prep—just don’t get too hung up on the mess!

Share our Strength: Cooking Matters

Cooking Matters is a program run by Share Our Strength, a nonprofit working to solve problems of hunger and poverty in the United States and around the world. Cooking Matters works in communities across the country to help parents and caregivers develop their skills when shopping for and cooking healthy foods on a budget. Their full curriculum is available online—and the nutrition handouts are fantastic.