Help feed the hungry. How to make your charitable contributions count.

November 6, 2025November 6, 2025 ~ Green Apple Dietitian ~ Leave a comment

I feel compelled to write about helping the less fortunate in the wake of the SNAP benefits fiasco. Access to food is a fundamental right, no matter race, gender, body size, age, or economic status. There’s no reason on Earth that food should be denied to anyone.

In all the years I’ve been a registered dietitian, food distribution remains a system with many forces that challenge it. There are days when my emotional side doesn’t agree with food service regulations that lead to food waste, despite my education and experience in dining services.

Reasons for food waste include:

Overage: When the amount of food served is less than what the kitchen forecasted. People don’t eat as much as kitchen staff anticipated, there’s poor inventory management, or a lack of proper storage.
A decline in food quality, such as spoilage, increases the risk of food-borne illnesses, which can be serious or deadly for certain segments of our population.
Aesthetics: Ugly edible food that doesn’t meet a retailer’s standards is discarded. How food looks to us is a normal biological defense mechanism against unsafe foods. If it doesn’t look good, we won’t eat it.

Yet my emotions surface when I observe full untouched pans of food getting thrown away minutes after the scheduled meal ends. At the very least, it should be available to the employees as a benefit of employment. Workers’ salaries in food service range from $11 to $19 per hour in the US, the last time I checked, which is abysmal in our current economy. I’m burnt out on hearing about food and staff shortages, while food service employees live in their cars.

I’m not here to claim I know everything about food service operations, but to the casual observer, discarding food always comes off as a stingy way of doing business. I don’t have to tell anyone that we seriously need to do better.

But I digress…

There’s a point when ranting no longer serves its purpose. It’s time to focus on making a difference. Here are some things I learned along the way, which will hopefully make it easier for folks to lend a helping hand. Let’s not become deer in headlights because we don’t know what to do.

How to feed the hungry. Don’t assume. Ask.

Start with the obvious, like donating food at a local grocery store. During the holidays, chances are you’ll see the familiar barrel dropped off by the local food pantry. There might even be a handy list of what foods they are asking for. Grocery stores also offer ready-to-eat meals or prepackaged bags of food for purchase. The hard work is already done.

Feeding America is nationally known. Log on to their website to learn about many aspects of giving. It’s a good place to begin if you’re starting a journey toward helping others.

Become more familiar with your local food bank. Visit their website, call them, and schedule a visit. Volunteers are more than happy to help navigate ways to help and are thankful when charitable people reach out. It’s the best place for the most current information about local people in need.

How to organize yourself and others to give generously

Alone or in a group, you can:

Start a food drive. Visit your local food pantry’s website and fill out an online form to have volunteers drop off one of their food barrels during a designated collection time. Otherwise, you can arrange to drop off donations.
Volunteer with family, friends, or co-workers to fill up food stock boxes, or participate in Meals on Wheels, to feed the elderly in need
Donate money directly on the pantry’s website or purchase items through their Amazon wish list. This is by far the easiest way to contribute, and you can do it periodically throughout the year.

Bust the myths of charitable giving. To make your donation count, don’t:

Assume what you eat will be the same as what everyone else eats. Not everyone has access to a stove, other cooking appliances, or even refrigeration. In lower-income neighborhoods, apartments for rent don’t always come with modern conveniences.
Buy bags of candy because you think that poor children never get to eat any. Yes, all children deserve candy or a cake on their birthday without judgment, but let’s leave that decision to the parents. Aim at acquiring food components that can be prepared and served within their economic environment. Research shows kids do better academically when they receive proper nourishment.
Clean out your pantry of old and expired food to give to charity. If you wouldn’t eat it, don’t expect others to, or to be grateful for food that’s past its expiration date.
Push your healthy eating expectations, which only leads to unhelpful assumptions, by expecting them to choose foods that don’t make sense financially. Help them get access to all foods in every food group.

Follow these tips and develop a way to give that will work for you and your budget. It’s time we stop accepting government shutdowns that cause unnecessary delays and do what we can to lift others. Let’s build a society where everyone can reap the benefits of a dignified life.

Links to explore:

U.S. Hunger Relief Organization | Feeding America

Find Your Local Food Bank | Feeding America

Volunteer Opportunities at Your Local Food Bank | Feeding America

Effects of poverty, hunger and homelessness on children and youth

The New York Times Replica Edition

Misfits Market, Imperfect Foods & the Battle Against Food Waste – Consumer Reports

How do you know you’re not dealing with a nutrition expert?

September 26, 2024November 1, 2024 ~ Green Apple Dietitian ~ Leave a comment

They demonize sugar. Yep, they criminalize a single nutrient source. They’re on a soapbox proclaiming that it’s ruining everyone’s health and how we should avoid it. This is silly because we all need a certain amount of sugar in the form of glucose to live.

As I see it, criticizing specific foods generally nudges individual choices in a direction that isn’t always best for them. The desire to be healthier can make someone vulnerable to organizations that incite fear and mistrust while exploiting the scientific ignorance of their followers. Others are downright conspiracy theorists who use words like “Big Agri and Big Pharma.” Large agricultural or drug conglomerates have their issues, but fearmongering can stifle objective reasoning.

During everyday conversations, I see an air of superiority while folks school others on how they should eat. The unsolicited kind that starts with “you should.” I suspect we’re all guilty of it on some level. But in my experience, any off-the-cuff statements automatically warrant further investigation.

Even in traditional healthcare settings, nutrition advice can be shortsighted. Often, I hear generalizations like, “Just cut out the sugar and eat more protein.” A practitioner untrained in nutrition education may not realize the repercussions of what they say. Especially for a patient who just learned they have type 2 diabetes. Phrases like this are a disservice to anyone seeking advice on what to do next. Imagine the emotional toll after learning your life is about to change significantly. At the very least, situations like this warrant a referral to someone who can explain how to introduce appropriate amounts of protein into the diet.

The nutrition expert knows it’s better to put aside their judgments while using a patient-centered approach. By completing a nutrition assessment, the dietitian gathers information about a patient’s health conditions, lifestyle, and food intake history. Then they can provide personalized medical nutrition therapy that meets a patient where they are instead of expecting them to conform to a certain ideal.

For the average consumer, it’s hard to know who to trust. There are bad apples everywhere. Most folks don’t pay enough attention to what they hear and immediately accept it as fact. They don’t go any further to look at the who, what, and where a source of information came from. But no one is born knowing how to review a scientific study published in a peer-reviewed journal. Most rely on an interpretation of the facts. But low-quality interpretations lead folks in the wrong direction.

The truth is no one knows everything there is to know about nutrition.

Nutrition science is ever-changing. The USDA updates itself every 5 years with new findings which can become the subject of sensationalism like the low-fat diets of the 90s left everyone hungrier. I admit to developing an obsession with baked potato chips back then. When I went back to regular chips, the taste was far better, and I didn’t eat as many.

As it turned out certain types of fat are beneficial to our health. Poly and monosaturated fats became the new heroes. But not before the food industry went off the deep end making low-fat versions of popular foods. Fat-free mayonnaise was by far the most ridiculous.

The modern all-or-nothing approach is to remove the sugar to double the protein. Once again the food industry answered the call. Now it’s common for people to self-prescribe a protein powder and avoid red meat while believing they’re consuming something natural. There are more brands of protein powder available than ever before. Too much of a good thing has negative health consequences.

A nutrition expert knows how to put the brakes on all the hype because they know there’s always more to every story. They look at both sides of an argument while pausing to review all the evidence before speaking to an audience. No flashy words, or celebrity endorsements. They don’t focus on placing the blame on things we can’t control, instead, they focus more on encouraging personal accountability. Most importantly they won’t validate the demonization of sugar, an all too important source of energy.

DISCLAIMER: The Green Apple Dietitian blog/Substack provides nutrition information for education only and is not intended to offer medical advice or cure any health conditions. The content should NEVER be used as a substitute for medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment of any health condition or problem. Any questions regarding your diet and health should be addressed to your specific healthcare providers. NEVER disregard professional medical advice or delay seeking treatment because of something you have read here.

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As a Registered Dietitian, I Don’t Tell People How to Eat and Why You Shouldn’t Either.

July 30, 2024July 30, 2024 ~ Green Apple Dietitian ~ Leave a comment

Doing what I do for a living makes it hard to ignore the plethora of horrendous nutrition advice I hear from people around me or on social media. The hardest truth I try to accept is how my knowledge as a dietitian means nothing to someone with an agenda. When patients seek advice about healthy eating, it often involves something more complicated. Something no meal plan can fix. A negative sense of self makes folks vulnerable to misinformation and unsolicited advice that misses the mark.

I hate the word healthy as it relates to food. As I watch others preach about healthy eating all I see is an obsession with weight loss. While others act with a sense of entitlement, they dramatize and incite fear around what we eat. Most general nutrition advice people share is a culmination of inaccuracies or partial truths. Whenever I ask where they heard that, I hear something like “I don’t know, I heard it somewhere,” or “I saw it on TikTok.”

It behooves you to awaken your inner critic and question what you hear within today’s landscape of advice overload. The most educated choice will be one that’s made after careful examination of both sides of a story. Let’s take carbohydrates. If you’re unwilling to listen to unpopular evidence of why you don’t want to completely avoid carbs, you won’t learn what they can do to benefit your health. But there may be other reasons driving your choice to avoid carbs.

Most folks giving health advice don’t consider behavioral health a vital component of food choices. A patient with an eating disorder avoids calories for fear of weight gain, while another with OCD who loves animals becomes vegan to avoid feeling shame around eating meat. Both have less to do with healthy eating and more to do with a distorted view of themselves. These are serious mental health issues that often lead to severe malnutrition if left untreated. This is where dieting misinformation and unsolicited advice becomes irresponsible and self-serving. You don’t know what you don’t know, so it’s better to keep unresearched opinions to yourself.

The word healthy means different things based on who’s teaching it. For a vitamin supplement company, it’s nutrition supplements. For a dieting company, it’s weight loss. But not everyone needs a supplement or should lose weight. As a dietitian, answering the question, “How can I eat healthier,” is not easy to answer because everyone has their own set of core values tied to their food choices. Telling a patient what they should be eating won’t be as helpful as they would like to believe. The greatest success I have with patients is by not acting like I know best about what they eat.

Unsolicited advice doesn’t help in fact, it can be harmful

It’s natural when we perceive something is wrong, we want to fix it. Let’s say Anne noticed Sally gained weight recently. Anne cares about Sally’s health. She lectures her on how obesity leads to chronic illness and that she should find a way to lose weight. Sally was already aware of her weight and never asked Anne for advice about weight loss. Sally has been meeting with a therapist every week to work on her emotions around eating since her father died. Anne was not aware of that. Even with people who are close to us, we don’t know everything they struggle with.

Lately, it feels like everyone believes they know everything about everyone else’s health. So, it’s hard to explain why well-intentioned diet advice from Aunt Edna at the family picnic is short-sighted. But here goes.

Why I won’t tell others what to eat

People often don’t do what they say they’re going to do. It’s not because they’re lazy or they lack willpower. It’s because they haven’t gotten to the root of the real issue. Often folks believe weight loss will make them feel better about themselves. But what they want is to go back to a time when they were more active, had less responsibility, and felt happier. Even patients as young as eighteen reminisce about an easier time in their life. Growing up is hard.

Food choices often have nothing to do with eating healthy. Eating disorders are complicated mental health issues that often hide in plain sight. Consider a person who loses a lot of weight, and now everyone around them is saying how good they look. Senseless judgment, criticism, and unsolicited advice are detrimental to the person who is suffering. I don’t blame people who don’t know better, I blame our society that stigmatizes mental health and drags its feet in distributing helpful information to folks who need it.

Rigid thinking gets in the way of making lasting lifestyle changes. If there’s a reason not to do something, you’ll always find it. If you’re looking for negativity, you’ll find that too. The fear of uncertainty that comes with change is often why we talk ourselves into doing nothing. Getting out of your comfort zone is easier said than done, but there’s more power in changing your view of yourself instead of asking me how you should eat. What drives your actions is how you think and what you believe.

When my career was in its infancy, I made a lot of mistakes while stumbling over my personal biases to figure out the best way to help someone. The more I learn the more I realize there’s so much I don’t know. My experience came with paying attention and listening, not lecturing on nutrition facts. Unless a patient is willing to share their story, what I say means nothing. Giving unwanted or the wrong medical nutrition therapy is a useless waste of everyone’s time. Chances are great that many patients sitting in front of me thought I didn’t know what I was talking about. When it came to their personal experience with food, they were right.