Happy New Year! With the bustle of the holidays behind us, we can all settle into our daily routines again and get pumped up for an exciting year ahead. One new venture that Sound Dietitians will be pursuing in 2016 is teaching hands-on family cooking classes at Verdant Community Wellness Center in Lynnwood, Washington. Our first class in January will be all about pizza, from homemade dough to freshly blended marinara sauce to simple tips for quick prep. And the best part is, we’ll get to directly involve kids in the cooking process. Actively including kids in meal planning and food preparation helps develop important life skills and is one of the best ways to promote appreciation for healthy eating early on.
 
One recipe we will be teaching in our pizza class is a personal favorite: tortilla pizza! This is a quick recipe for those days when you’re craving a crispy, tasty pizza but want to get dinner on the table in 20 minutes or less. There is no need to fuss with dough because a whole wheat tortilla or flatbread makes the perfect base. Just add sauce, top it, and bake for 10 minutes at 400°F – quick, easy, and delicious!

Stay tuned for more posts about all things food and nutrition throughout 2016. Check out the Verdant Community Wellness Center events calendar if you are interested in learning about other health and wellness classes, seminars, and activities available to the public. Cheers to a healthy and delicious year!
 
~ Holly, RDN

​There is often a flurry of interest in Nutrition as people look forward to the fresh start of a New Year.  Unfortunately, good intentions, motivation and optimism can often be misguided by the extensive misinformation available at our finger tips. With over 600,000 different diet books on the market, if you tried each one for 2 weeks it would take you over 23,000 years to get through the various plans. Whew!

Thankfully, we have plenty of research showing that dieting (in the sense of extreme over-restriction) does not work in the long-run and in the short-term it makes people miserable and is potentially dangerous. Are you ready to get off the dieting merry-go-round? One approach to helping people break the cycle of dieting is called Intuitive Eating. 
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