GSDM student wins grant money to continue nutrition education project
Nutrition is a vital component of any healthcare professional student’s education—but what if there was a more exciting and engaging way to learn about it?
Annce Kadri DMD 22, Skelly Enabulele (UMass Med 21) and Robert Gargano (GMS 18, NYU Dentistry 22) hope to answer that question with the help of a seed grant they won during the Innovate@BU Community Impact Challenge in November 2020. The grant will support the trio’s efforts to teach healthcare professional students about nutrition – and how to communicate about nutrition – through interactive, virtual cooking lessons.
“Our goal is to educate healthcare professional students—medical, dental, nursing and public health students— on how to communicate with their patients and to provide education in a culturally competent way,” Kadri said.
Innovate@BU is a University-wide initiative to enable all BU Terriers to become drivers of innovation in their own lives, careers, and communities. This fall, Innovate@BU challenged BU students to develop ideas to support and promote wellbeing in their communities at BU and beyond. Kadri and his team entered their project – which they titled “Teeth n’ Bones” – into the local-community category and were selected as one of 10 finalists to receive a $500 seed grant. On November 20, they participated in a “Finalists Showcase,” where they pitched their idea to participants in the hope of receiving additional funding.
Due to the COVID-19 social distancing restrictions, the showcase was hosted virtually. Each team had one minute to pitch their idea. Participants were then able to “visit” each team at a showcase “table” to learn more about the idea or share feedback. Participants then voted for their favorite team to receive additional funding—and Teeth n’ Bones was one of two teams to receive additional funding.
“During the showcase, our table was so full that REMO [the virtual table system] kept crashing on us because it couldn’t let everyone in,” said Kadri. “We ended up being the most voted-for topic, [so] we got the additional funding.”
Kadri said that the next step for Teeth n’ Bones is to become a business in the state of Massachusetts. Once they’re recognized as an entity in the state, they hope to work with meal distribution companies to help with the logistics of distributing meal kits to accompany the teaching in the kitchen lessons.
Long-term, he said that he hopes to see the project have a website, a partnership with a meal kit company and to invite guest chefs who specialize in a variety of cuisines to teach lessons.
“We’ll have a database of culturally diverse recipes, so a dentist or physician could send their patient to our website—or to have the provider distribute them [to the patient] themselves,” Kadri said.
He continued: “You’re not going to tell someone from Jamaica who moved here [to the U.S.] five years ago to eat something that you would tell an Eastern European immigrant to eat—they would have different palates and taste preferences, so we’re trying to develop recipes that would appeal to different cultures.”
Kadri said that it’s important for healthcare professionals to be educated on nutrition and to pass that knowledge along to their patients.
“Preventative medicine is the best medicine,” said Kadri, noting that nutrition and medical conditions can be closely linked. “If we talk to [patients about nutrition], educate them in a sustainable way, appeal to what they like, I’m hoping we can chip away at their medical conditions and have better oral health and systemic health outcomes.”