Kettering Health is hosting healthy cooking classes aimed at rural communities.
A class meets 5 p.m. Thursdays in the Cedarville Fire Department to learn about the fundamentals of cooking for different health conditions. The classes run through Feb. 20 with changing recipes based on specific health benefits.
Physicians from Kettering Health lead the classes, funded by more than $1.9 million dollars in grant money from the Health Resources and Services Administration and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
One of these physicians teaching classes is Dr. Jannise Schimpf.
Schimpf is a family medicine resident with Kettering Health. She said class attendees learn how to cook for health conditions such as diabetes, high blood pressure, heart disease and cancer.
The layout for each class follows the American College of Lifestyle Medicine culinary medicine curriculum.
“Essentially, we get here, we talk about just safe food handling, some knife skills as well," she said. "Then we set up different stations where we prepare these recipes and then we talk about just the disease that we're going to cover that day.”
These weekly sessions are part of Kettering Health's five-year initiative to improve health outcomes in rural areas by meeting those communities where they are.
Providing accessible education on healthy cooking with low-cost items can help with this mission, according to Schimpf.
“Definitely a lot of health benefits with plant-based eating, less saturated fat," she said. "Just a lot of health prevention and chronic medical management.”
Schimpf said classes typically have seven to eight attendees each week.
Schimpf encourages others to attend the classes to learn more about health eating.
"From prior classes, [there was] very good feedback," she said. "They definitely learned some new tips that they hadn't learned before just how to incorporate certain vegetables, maybe some things that they never tried before."
