The Food Doctor

Some of the students took this question into their own hands, sharing what they learned from Irven with their families. “Parents were getting involved and would take their kids grocery shopping,” Irven says. “The reactions I got from them were always very positive because they were excited that their kids were coming home asking for things that parents had long ago stopped trying to get them to eat.”

Anthony Bower was one such student who took the information he learned directly to his father, Tony, and stepmother, Rose. Anthony, now a 17-year-old junior, participated in Irven’s classes his freshman and sophomore years.

“Anthony came home and started telling me that everything I was eating was actually bad for me,” Tony recalls. “He pointed out the trans fats and all the things I didn’t want to know about the foods I ate.” But Tony and Rose quickly got the message. “All of a sudden the student became the teacher,” Tony says. “So we started to purge the cupboards.”

“It was painful for my dad,” Anthony adds with a laugh. The Italian family switched out its beloved semolina pastas and white breads for whole-wheat alternatives.  Gone were the frozen and prepackaged meals, replaced by fresh, whole foods.

The nutritional shift paid off in dividends. The whole family lost weight, and Tony’s cholesterol levels improved dramatically. They report having more energy, getting up earlier and being more active. Anthony’s parents never once questioned his commitment to the cause. “Anthony came home showing a lot of compassion,” Tony says. “He wanted to see us live long, healthy lives, to be there for him and someday his future family. How could you not buy into it?”

EXPANDING HER REACH

To further enlighten parents on what their children were learning, Irven wrote a book called Please Don’t Eat the Wallpaper. The book—named after Irven’s realization that her mother used the same flour in baking and cooking as a base for wallpaper glue—outlines the message she delivers in the classroom.

“Please Don’t Eat the Wallpaper” now serves as required background reading for the nutrition classes Irven continues to teach at the Health Academy and another school, the Crystal River Environmental Academy.

Irven’s grassroots approach has reached beyond the borders of Crystal River. Administrators at the Salk School of Science in Manhattan ordered 120 copies of the book for their students. HealthCorps, founded by Dr. Mehmet Oz, has asked Irven to give a presentation to the group, which aims to stem the childhood-obesity crisis through school-based health education and mentoring.

Seven years after teaching her first nutritional class, Irven remains motivated because she sees “so many people who are just a slight shift away from feeling really bad to feeling really good. There are 14-year-olds who have terrible digestive problems. They have learning disabilities. Their quality of life makes me want to cry. I get to know them individually, and I know that it can be so simple to just make a few changes in their diet.”

These days, Irven finds that although students are more familiar with terms such as trans fat and high-fructose corn syrup, they still lack basic information on how to be healthy eaters.

“Food is being taught to them as carbohydrates, fats, proteins, calories,” Irven notes. “It’s being taught as, ‘This little Oreo cookie package here only has 100 calories, so this is better for you.’ But there is absolutely no connection to quality calories.”

Furthermore, much of the nutritional education that teens receive focuses on the cannot’s versus the can’s. “These students are overwhelmed with people telling them, ‘You can’t have MSG and you can’t have red food coloring and you can’t have yellow dye,’ but what can you have?” Irven asks. “So I brought it down to where they could touch the food, feel it and experience it. And many of the students have made substantial changes in their diets. We need to continue to help kids understand the incredible nutritional quality of real food.”