Healthy Eating – Celebrity chef cooks up a show
Clemson students balance academics, meetings, intramurals, studying, social life, work and more. It’s difficult for students to schedule an extra meeting, much less three times a day to eat.
It’s often easier to grab something quick than it is to make healthy eating choices.
On Friday, Sept. 23, CLEMSONLiVE brought Kevin Roberts, better known as “The Food Dude,” to Clemson’s campus for an interactive lecture on healthy eating habits. Roberts has been featured on over 100 national and local television shows, including “The Today Show,” “The CBS Early Show,” “Better TV” and “The Food Network”; he now hosts TLC’s “BBQ PitMasters” and lectures at university campuses nationwide.
He owns and serves as executive chef at four restaurants in San Diego and has written and published two cookbooks.
“We brought him because we felt that healthy eating is an important issue on campus that a lot of students are not educated about,” said Karen Cuneo, director of LiVE Outreach for CLEMSONLiVE. “There are simple ways to eat nutritiously, but many people don’t know how.”
Roberts focused his lecture on healthy eating habits and specifically on foods that people should avoid, such as soda and fried chicken. He also emphasized foods that people should eat — grapes, tea and whole grains, for example.
Roberts strongly emphasized that students should eat breakfast, which is something that a lot of students don’t necessarily think about in the morning when they’re running late for class.
“Chef Roberts had the ability to make nutrition seem simple and delicious,” Cuneo said. “We really are what we eat, and in college it becomes very difficult to know what is best; we don’t have our parents cooking every meal.”
“Chef Roberts proved that you don’t have to sacrifice taste to live a healthy, nutritious lifestyle,” she said.
During the show, students were able to
test their nutritional knowledge and try samples that Roberts provided.
Mollye MacNaughton, a sophomore in the food science department, said, “I am in dairy science, baking science and food regulations, and during Chef Kevin’s demonstration I related various health and science topics to my classes. I thought his way of encouraging students to eat healthier by showing them how easy healthier choices are to make was a much better way [than] just telling students to eat less sugar or workout more.”
At the end of the show, five students were asked to participate in a hot sauce chugging contest, which was widely accepted by the students in the audience. Roberts provided the hot sauce.
“The lessons Kevin Roberts talked about made me realize how easy healthy eating can be, even on a college budget,” said Christine O’Hara, a Clemson sophomore who attended the lecture.
“It’s important to start making healthy choices about food now; the eating habits you develop in college will continue for the rest of your life,” she said.
