Registered dietician Marsha Miller holds up a bunch of bananas while asking a question about the best ingredients for a smoothie on Oct. 16 at the Anschutz Health and Wellness Center in Aurora. (Seth McConnell | YourHub)
Debbie Bochert asks students from North Middle School about sugar content in beverages while leading a discussion on proper serving sizes. (Seth McConnell | YourHub)
A sheepish and disappointed-looking gaggle of teenagers stood around a shopping cart inside the grocery lab at the Anschutz Health and Wellness Center. About half of them were holding their favorite bottle of juice, soda or some kind of energy drink, and they had just received some bad news - their choices are garbage.
"Can anyone tell me what kind of things you can do with Coke?" Debbie Bochert, a dietetic technician at the Health and Wellness Center asked the shy eighth-graders.
"Drink it," a few of them mumbled.
"Maybe," Bochert said. "You can also clean your car battery with it. Just pour it over the white gunk that builds up on the battery, then take a swig and it'll dissolve your teeth the same way."
Bochert explained the soda's phosphoric acid content depletes calcium from human bones and erodes tooth enamel irreparably.
A few students ran their tongues across their front teeth and stared at the ground.
Robert Valenzuela, 14, dropped a thin can of Red Bull back into the cart at the end of the activity.
"I don't really drink it, but I picked it out because it's so small and I didn't think it had that much sugar in it," Valenzuela said. "Now I know. And now I know how to find out what's actually in my food."
The grocery label exercise was stop number one out of four during a health-conscious field trip that about 55 students from Aurora's North Middle School Health Sciences and Technology campus went on Oct. 16.
The students are all part of the Aurora LIGHTS health sciences pathway program that serves East and North Middle Schools.
The program recruits kids who have dreams of being doctors and health-care professionals, and then starts them on that path before high school.
Valenzuela, for example, is interested in the brain and wants to be a "neuroscientist of some kind" one day. He said basic nutrition knowledge and concepts are just as important to his desired field of study as they are to anyone else's, whether they're doctors or not.
And that's exactly the kind of lesson Loretta Erickson wants these kids to pick up on. Erickson is the student adviser and coordinator of the Aurora LIGHTS program at North Middle School Academy of Health Sciences and Technology.
The program was created from a federal grant six years ago. Its purpose, according to Erickson, is to recruit and retain bright, underrepresented students into the health-care profession.
"All of the experiences that these students get (at Anschutz Medical Campus) is to teach them how much the health and wellness field encompasses," Erickson said. "There are pathways into therapeutic and diagnostic professions that they are being exposed to now so that they see the world and its possibilities more expansively."
The world's possibilities opened up to Valenzuela a little more at the next station — smoothie making. There, Marsha Miller, a registered dietician, revealed to him and 14 other students in his group that adding a small spoonful of peanut butter to your morning smoothie is a great way to add protein and flavor to the power meal.
"(Smoothie making) was my favorite station," Valenzuela said. "I learned a lot about peanut butter's (versatility) in different meals."
The groups of students, teachers and parent-volunteers walked to the field trip from their campus at 12095 Montview Blvd. They took turns at each of the stations, which also included a 30-minute workout and discussion with the center's resident personal trainers.
This was the second year that Erickson brought the students from the Aurora LIGHTS program to the Anschutz Health and Wellness Center.
"We predict a vast shortage of health-care professionals in this country," Erickson said. "If we can begin to interest kids early by partnering industry with public schools, we can someday meet the demand."
Megan Mitchell: 303-954-2650, mmitchell@denverpost.com, or twitter.com/MMitchelldp[1] [2]
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