In a kitchen classroom at Texas Christian University’s Annie Richardson Bass Building, Spanish-speaking Tarrant County residents learned about the tools they need to keep themselves healthy. These cooking lessons, hosted by Tarrant County Medical Society’s Project Access, converted classroom education to practical learning.

Empowering Patients

Over the span of a month, the project taught about a dozen attendees the health benefits and drawbacks of different foods and provided tangible instructions on how to cook a healthy meal. Salud en tus Manos — or Health in Your Hands — was “an opportunity to empower patients to feel more confident when they go to the doctor’s office, feel like they can be a more active participant in their care and then, when they go home, feel like they can apply that to their day-to-day lives,” said Alex Koehl, a third-year TCU medical student who has led the project.

Iris Jauregui, who attended two of the three classes, asked about cholesterol in food and how it affects her health. She learned the difference between good and bad cholesterol, and that cholesterol levels are more affected — for better and worse — by fiber and fats. The value of Salud en tus Manos became evident through other classes hosted by Project Access, said Kathryn Keaton, director of the program.

Classroom education paired with tangible cooking lessons is one way to give patients practical solutions, Keaton said. “Let’s address education by helping patients understand how their diet affects chronic diseases,” she said. The cooking instruction was also designed to be culturally relevant. Instead of simply telling patients rice and beans with lard isn’t healthy, the course provided alternative ways to make favorite foods tasty, Keaton said.

Original reporting: Fort Worth Report — read the source article.