In the fourth episode of the podcast, After speaking with Featured Falcon/Dungeons and Falcons member Logan Grigo (1:46), Harlee Follick and Ansel Grigo dive into the physical and economic realities of a healthy diet. Mrs. Negium joins (5:25) to share some great information on healthy eating and how to condition your taste buds! 

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The Falcon’s Nast podcast

before we begin, we would like to acknowledge that the Falcon’s Nest podcast is produced, recorded and distributed on treaty six territory, the traditional lands of many diverse first nations including Cree, Dene Nakota, Soto and Dakota, as well as the traditional homeland of the Metis. The Falcons as podcast team pays their respects to the First Nations and maytee ancestors of this land, and is committed to truly listening and learning as we work towards reconciliation together. If you're listening in different location, please take the time to acknowledge the original stewards of the land you are currently on. Hey there, listeners. I'm Lea McKay-Argyriouand I'm here to let you know about today's amazing prize. The Falcons This podcast is offering a $25 survery gift card and Starbucks waterbottle to listeners

to enter wait until you hear the prize code which will be revealed later in the episode. Once you know the code. Click on the Google Form link in the description and follow the instructions. Good luck. And now please welcome Harlee Follick and Ansel Grigo to the mic

Hi, I'm Ansel Grieco. And I'm Harlee Follick. Welcome to the fourth episode of the Falcons Nest podcast. Here you will have an auditory experience about what it is like at MarionGraham Collegiate to connect you to your community. You will be updated on upcoming events. Hear from a variety of students at our school and learn tips related to physical, mental and emotional health. This episode we will be discussing good nutrition. Before we can do that. Let's talk to our featured Falcon first. Hi, Logan. Hi. how are you? Pretty good. So you're currently in grade nine, right? What has grade nine been like for you? Well, it's been very different than eighth grade and seventh grade. Because I'm in high school now. And there's two floors. Also I'm not used to having like, different people in different classes. I'm used to being like in one group. Yeah, I remember when I came I was like it was so

I understand that you're in grams dungeon and Falcons club. How do you know? Yeah, that's true. What do you like about d&d is pretty fun. And it's on Fridays. So like after d&d, I can just go home and do nothing all day. I love that for you. Students should give it a try, even if it sounds mad. That's what I thought. But my friends nagged me enough to play it for a bit, and it was quite fun. Have you always been interested in d&d? When I first heard of the art of it, I thought it was for nerds. Oh my gosh, same. But then I played it with my brothers, and some of my oldest brother's friends, and it was pretty fun. Will you be playing more next year? Yeah. I'm gonna be playing more next year. And then the year after that, still have one more year after the end of the summer. That's crazy. I know. So

now that you're leaving grade nine, is there any advice you would like to give to grade eights coming to high school this fall? Don't be an idiot. Pay attention in math class in any other class. I did not pay attention. So I'm like scrambling to do my work. Now. Do your homework. Don't leave it for the last day. focus in class. You can have fun balls. You got to do school. Yeah, that's very true. Well, thank you so much for coming. No. Oh, well, thank you so much for coming. Thank you for having me. Now let's get into some nutrition facts.

What is a good diet. According to Canada's Food Guide, they recommend half a plate of fruits and veggies, a quarter proteins and the other quarter for whole grains. Really, I mean, half a plate of plant foods. They are like super expensive. I know. Research has found that eating healthy costs on average $3.54 more per day than eating unhealthy. This is around four times higher good gravy. That's awful. Not everyone can afford to eat like that, which is terrible. And it isn't just in Canada, this is almost a global issue. And many countries are recommended healthy diet isn't accessible for 90% of people plus processed foods are much cheaper to produce and buy and given inflation. Many people have to resort to them. Processed foods may offer some nutritional value, but definitely not what the average person needs. In fact, in most grocery stores, a lot of the greens are cared for with lots of chemicals to make sure that it is quote unquote, higher value and those chemicals can get into us and who knows what that is going to do to us in the future? Well, researchers have found that consuming foods that have been covered with pesticides can lead to problems with our nervous immune and reproductive systems. We really gotta test with those chemicals can do to our bodies. If people really want food that had chemicals used on them, we should see if there are ways to make them not hurt humans and other animals. It seems to be either illness or go broke here. Is there a way where people can eat healthier while still being accessible?

personally in my family, we have a garden that we tend to every year to help grow our own vegetables. Now I know this won't be accessible for everyone given the amount of water and effort it takes. But if you can, it is quite rewarding. You can also go to farmers markets where the foods are less likely to be grown and cared for with an excessive amount of chemicals and educate yourself on what food products are made of to make informed decisions of what you're putting in your body. Is there anyone at Marion Graham that can help teach us about good nutrition? Yes, Mrs. Negium was a food safety here at Graham. Let's ask her.

Hi, Ansel, how are you doing? Good. How are you? Good. That's good. So you teach some of the food classes at Marian Graham? Correct? Yes, I do. How long? Have you been teaching foods? I've only been teaching foods for three years here at Marian Graham. But before that I taught commercial cooking for 14 years. Oh, well, what's the difference between foods and commercial cooking? Commercial cooking is more industrial. And it's larger recipes and more skill based whereas Food Studies is more about nutrition and concepts of food instead of more practical, larger scale meals. All right. What sort of things do you have your students make in food class. In foods class, we I really try to encourage students to make a variety of different foods. So we cover different modules within the course. Basic things from

simple recipes to simple baking skills. And then we graduate up to more difficult concepts like candy making and

chocolate and pies and pastries and that sort of thing. But I strongly encouraged students to try different ingredients and push the boundaries of their tastebuds and their skills with different ingredients. Sounds like a very fun class, I would know because I'm in it

sounds pretty nutritional too. What are some ways you can suggest our listeners on how to eat healthier? Um, to be honest, I think eating a wide variety of different things is probably your best bet to get the most diverse nutrition. Every color of food is a different mineral and vitamin. And so when you eat a different variety of colors, you're getting all those vitamins and nutrients that offer that variety. And I don't, I don't ever want to say to someone to eliminate something from their diet, just to eat a wide variety of different things. Healthy eating really should be more affordable considering how important it is. It's a shame that so many people don't have access to healthy food options. What do you suggest for people who don't have access to these more expensive healthy foods? What are some affordable ways you can eat healthier even if it's in small ways. So a great way to eat affordably is to eat

vegetables and fruit that are in season, I would say that's probably your most expensive ticket item for nutritious food is fresh produce. And because we live in Saskatchewan, we don't have a very long growing season. So our seasonal foods are very limited with saying that great things to do is harvest a lot of things from your garden or local markets, and then freeze different things. If you don't have the opportunity to do that you can always buy frozen or canned vegetables and fruit. But the only thing I would recommend is that you read the labels because often when you're buying frozen fruit or canned vegetables and fruit, they have added sugar or salt or syrup or something like that. So it's really important that you need to look at the labels to see what added things are in those canned or frozen items. Thankfully, foods classes can also give students who may not be able to afford to eat healthily lots of chances to cook and enjoy delicious nutritional meals coming from someone who's in misdiagnosed foods 20 class, it's a great experience, aside from the paperwork, not a fan of that I understand I understand but sometimes learning the concepts is what makes you a better cook. Right? And so the skills like yes, it's all about skills but once you know concepts and understand why you're doing something, you can apply that to so many different things. And when you're cooking at home like I can't stress enough how when you cook food from scratch at home, it costs so much less and you know what's going into your food so that's really important to not have those you know secret preservatives or added sugars or salts and sugar comes in so many different forms that it's really hard to tell sometimes on your labels. What actually is sugar because it has so many different names. It really does. I don't know the difference between Apple sugar and like the sugar and some artificial sweetener. Yeah, well dextrose sucrose, like there's all the different crosses are our sugars in different forms a lot of Croesus

Do you have any final thoughts or advice to share before we end off the episode? My final thoughts are I think that students should

really keep an open mind or anyone keep an open mind when they're trying foods. When you're using different cooking methods or cooking things in a different way, with different ingredients, they really taste different each time. And when you start to incorporate more fruits and vegetables into your diet, it actually changes your tastebuds. So then you start to crave more fruits and vegetables. And when you eliminate sugars from your diet, you don't crave those sugars as much. And so it's really just kind of changing how you see food. And if you want to make changes, you can change your taste buds to crave fruits and vegetables instead of craving sugar and salt. Hmm, I didn't know that. That's pretty helpful to know, actually, yeah. And sometimes it's really hard. Like in the beginning, like I always tell my students, if after school, you always go to 711, or whatever the convenience store and get us like Slurpee or smoothie or some sort of sweet snack, your body is expecting that, at that, like you you expected. And so when you take it away, your body does start to crave that sugar hit. And if you take that away and eat an apple, instead, it's training your tastebuds, to not crave and need that sugar. And then you can take it one step further by changing it a little bit more. But your body does go through a bit of withdrawal phase when you take when you're used to having sugar all the time. And then you take it out of your diet. And when I say diet, I don't mean like you're on a diet, I just mean like what you're eating that day. So when you take that out, you're lacking something that you're used to getting. So it takes a while for your body to kind of get used to not having that.

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I feel I feel like I really made that more complicated than it is. But it makes sense. So it's basically like conditioning your body then yeah, like if you if you I don't know, decide, You know what, I don't feel really great when I'm eating all this sugar all the time. And so you're like, I need to cut this out of my diet. And often people think if I cut this out of my diet, like I need it because I get such a bad headache, or like I'm really tired. But those are that's your body going into withdrawal from not having the usual sugar intake that you usually get. So once your body basically gets used to not having that, then you don't crave it anymore. So that makes sense. Yeah, it makes sense. It's really interesting to know actually. And if you it's the opposite is the same if you after school, eat veggies and dip and have or like just an apple or something like that, like you crave those things that you normally eat. It's conditioning, your taste buds, like wow, that is really neat. And so sometimes like, like I use the example with my own family with whole wheat flour. And students always like we in foods class, we use whole wheat flour because whole grains have fiber. And fiber is key to a healthy digestive system and keeps you full, and you flush out all the toxins from your body. With eating fiber, though you need to drink a lot of water because if you eat fiber and don't drink water, it does the opposite, right? It keeps those toxins in you and they don't

get eliminated. But whole wheat flour has a certain texture, right. So it has that grainy, dense, hearty, earthy kind of texture and lots of students and people don't like it for that very reason. But from my perspective, when I eat something with all purpose flour, or white flour, it doesn't have that fiber, and it almost like melts in my mouth and feels like doughy and sticks to the roof of my mouth. And so I don't like that at all. But I grew up eating white pole allpurpose bread and not knowing any different. It's just experiencing something different. Yeah, the kind of flower you use can really change the outcome like with the cookies we made in your class that one time with different types of flowers. Oh, boy. Yes. And it all depends on the fiber, the protein content within the flower. That's interesting. Has that chemical reaction.

Love chemicals.

All right. I think that's all the time we have. Thank you so much for coming in. You're welcome. Thank you for having me. Yeah. It was great having you

Wow, thank you Harlee and Ansel Good nutrition is such an important element of living a healthy lifestyle, but it is often overlooked. I hope that all of our listeners learn some tips and tricks they can use when making food related choices. Now, let's take a look at the many events happening for students at MMGCI or right now. As you see elections are right around the corner. If you're interested in planning events, spirit days, fundraisers or pep rallies, or you want to be a leader in your school, keep an eye out for some information on the Instagram page. Our track and field season is heating up. Keep an eye on the schedule to come out and support our many talented athletes. The intramural floor hockey season is in its final stretch come out in the gym at lunch to take in some exciting playoff action. The FLSA is having a year-end soda sale every Friday in the commons. Come on and check it out.

We have many great clubs at the school. Check out our Paranormal Society for all things booking supernatural, or try your hand at coding, building and problem solving with the robotics club. The eSports club is also accepting new members all are free to come out and join a growing community of gamers. In addition, the yearbook club is looking for new members and is a great opportunity for writers photographers and graphic designers. There's a club for everyone at MMGCIi

Well, that's all for this episode. Tune into next episode where we cover drunk driving and its consequences. Watch our Instagram and Tiktok @mmgcifalconsnest for more details. As always thank you for your support. Without listeners like you this podcast wouldn't exist in the form it does today. And we really appreciate you. If you want to provide feedback in your listening experience or you want to suggest to us who should be interviewed. Send an email to falconnestpodcast@gmail.com Don't forget to check out our website which is linked in the description. Fly high falcons and see you next time