You are what you eat. That adage has been around forever for a reason. 

The foods we consume have changed drastically over the last few decades. Packaged, highly processed foods have flooded groceries, gas stations, schools, sporting events, and gatherings. It's practically impossible for a child or adult to go a day without having ultra-processed fare offered or simply sitting out to grab. 

We're still learning the full impact this has on our minds and bodies. So far the data and anecdotal evidence show it's not good. And to be clear, this has nothing to do with weight or appearance. We're talking overall health, growth, behavior, and how we feel. 

Shunta Summers sees this every day. She is the owner and president of Foundations Learning Academy. She's dedicated her life's work to childhood education and nutrition because she understands how it impacts the lives and futures of young people.

The Odyssey: Parenting. Caregiving. Disability. 

The Center for Family Involvement at VCU School of Education's Partnership for People with Disabilities provides informational and emotional support to people with disabilities and their families. All of our services are free. We just want to help. We know how hard this can be because we're in it with you. 

 

TRANSCRIPT:

01:00:07 :20 - 01:00:36 :07

Erin Croyle

Welcome to The Odyssey. Parenting, Caregiving, Disability. I'm Erin Croyle, the creator and host of The Odyssey podcast explores the turn our lives take when a loved one has a disability. I join the club, so to speak, in 2010, when my first child was born with Down's Syndrome. I left my career as a television journalist to immerse myself in parenting and understanding all things disability.

 

01:00:36 :09 - 01:01:03 :01

Erin Croyle

This eventually led to my work at the Center for Family Involvement at VCU's Partnership for People with Disabilities as a communications specialist. The impact our diets have on our brains and bodies has always interested me. Becoming a parent of three very different children and learning what families and schools are dealing with when it comes to nutrition made me realize how complicated feeding children can be.

 

01:01:03 :03 - 01:01:21 :01

Erin Croyle

Shunta Summers is going to break this down with me today. She's the owner and president of Foundations Learning Academy in Richmond, Virginia. Her child care center has a focus on early childhood education and nutrition.

 

01:01:21 :03 - 01:01:44 :22

Erin Croyle

Shunta, thank you so much for joining me. You have such an interesting background. Born in Queens, graduate from high school in Chesterfield, majored in food science at North Carolina State University. You own and run a successful business. You do volunteer and advocacy work. You're a mother of four. I don't know how you do it all. Maybe we should start with a what I eat in a day quiz.

 

01:01:44 :22 - 01:01:49 :00

Erin Croyle

Right to figure it out. Seriously, though, how do you do it all?

 

01:01:49 :02 - 01:02:16 :08

Shunta Summers

Well, thank you so much, Erin, for having me today. I like all of you. We're in this together. We're growing and learning as we live. One of the things that I do is I try to plan as much as possible, but life happens, throws us curveballs. We can't always do what we planned to do in the day. So that's one of the reasons why one of the key things is prepping.

 

01:02:16 :10 - 01:02:37 :16

Shunta Summers

I'm a big advocate for prepping at the center as well as at my home, because a lot of times I have to spend more time at the center. There are times that I don't get to provide the home cooked meals that I want to at home. So my alternative is to have meals prepped for my children so that they can grab and go.

 

01:02:37 :17 - 01:03:00 :15

Shunta Summers

It makes a lot easier that they're getting older, but I still want to make sure that they're given the best choices as possible, knowing that there's so many alternatives at their fingertips that they could just order food to come to their homes whenever. So I do understand the importance of having food too readily available at home as well as at the center.

 

01:03:00 :15 - 01:03:05 :05

Shunta Summers

And that's one of the things we try to educate our families about as well.

 

01:03:05 :07 - 01:03:23 :03

Erin Croyle

And we're going to get into what you suggested prep later on. I'm writing it down on my notes to make sure we follow up with that question. But I want to give you a little bit more background to who you are. I'm really interested in what got you interested in food science and the connection to early childhood.

 

01:03:23 :05 - 01:03:47 :15

Shunta Summers

One of the things was I was actually pre-med in school and then I did well, biochemistry, organic chemistry, loved it. But then once I had to start getting into working with humans and blood, I just didn't enjoy it. But then I also was fascinated me was how much food really does affect our bodies on a daily basis. So that's one of the reasons why I went into food science.

 

01:03:47 :17 - 01:04:25 :15

Shunta Summers

And I absolutely loved it because what I learned at school, a lot of times people say, what you learn school you don't really use in the real world. But those basic concepts that I learned early on still provides the framework for what I do now, even with early childhood development, because I take it our holistic approach. We don't just look at the educational needs, we look at social, emotional, plus the nutritional needs of these children, because we're actually helping families too, because a lot of our families, they don't know how to properly feed their children.

 

01:04:25 :15 - 01:04:53 :17

Shunta Summers

There's a lot of processed food, so introducing the child as early as possible to healthy, nutritious meals, you can really help their tastebuds very early on so that they don't want and need and crave the highly processed, salty, sugary, sweet foods that don't have high nutritional value that's going to last and help them grow and develop either.

 

01:04:53 :19 - 01:05:25 :05

Erin Croyle

I am so glad that you brought that up because something that so many parents struggle with is how hard it is to feed our kiddos. Right? And by right I don't mean right versus wrong or good food versus bad food. This conversation is not going to be about more diet culture nonsense. It's about nourishment. And in my experience as a parent, as someone who is involved in schools and someone who's at sporting events, when I say it's hard to feed our children, right, I mean that they are inundated with heavily in ultra processed foods.

 

01:05:25 :11 - 01:05:45 :10

Erin Croyle

Everywhere they go. There is these things called Scooby Snacks that are like on the label. They say they're good for kids and multigrain. But if you look at the actual packaging, I mean, it's all refined ingredients. Yes. Sugar. So much of the convenient stuff for toddlers and children and adults, for that matter. It's engineered for all of us to want more, right?

 

01:05:45 :11 - 01:05:55 :15

Erin Croyle

Yes. And then you couple that with food aversions and all these other things, it's really hard to establish and maintain a palate for foods. So tell me more about your experience with this.

 

01:05:55 :17 - 01:06:25 :23

Shunta Summers

So it is very challenging just from even the childcare perspective is because you want to do especially post-COVID, you want to have as many individually wrapped items as possible, but then that also means highly processed foods that are the lower nutritional value. So just last week I was at a food show. They know that we're vegetarian, So one of the things that they had was Kellogg's.

 

01:06:26 :00 - 01:07:01 :00

Shunta Summers

They came in, we went to to them and I saw the stuff. But then I also know there's another smaller company that has a whole grain that uses oats versus the refined and the enriched flour. Those type of things where you have to be aware of. Yes, the packaging is not as p