CAHS Students Give Fruit and Veggie Aisle Tours at Kroger

Are there benefits to eating fresh or frozen fruits and vegetables over canned?

"These are questions we get asked all the time.  A lot of people think that canned has more sodium, but that’s not always the case,” says Sarah Limbert, a senior dietetics student at the University of Cincinnati’s College of Allied Health Sciences.

Limbert’s knowledge of fruits and vegetables will certainly be valuable to her future clients, but right now it’s also valuable to UC underclassmen. That’s because Limbert is one of 26 seniors who will lead grocery store tours—at the Mitchell Avenue Kroger store—for incoming UC freshmen this fall.

While leading the tour fulfills a supervised practice component in a community rotation, taking the tour is part of a class called Personal Nutrition, an elective for incoming University freshmen but a requirement for students majoring in dietetics.

"For many students it’s the first time they’ve been away from home and likely the first time they’ve had to shop or cook,” says Allison Kuhn, a UC alum and Kroger corporate dietitian who is training the upperclassmen tour guides.

Over the course of the training session, Kuhn leads the dietetic interns throughout the store stopping at different sections to explain common questions about fruits and vegetables (for example, what does organic mean?).

"It’s not just about fresh fruits and vegetables—it addresses dried, canned and frozen fruits and vegetables,” says Kuhn.      

This community rotation is a first for interns in the college’s Department of Nutritional Sciences’ accredited Coordinated Program in Dietetics The grocery store tours are sponsored by the Produce for Better Health Foundation, which selected UC and Kroger and 10 other academic programs and grocery partners to receive funding. The foundation provides a grant of more than $1200 for intern training and goodie bags, and for produce samples for participants at the end of their tour.

"It’s a wonderful opportunity for the interns ‘to promote nutrition in the community by delivering respectful science based answers to consumer questions’, which is one of the accrediting agency’s competencies for this program,” says Elise Cowie, MEd,RD,LD, Director of the Coordinated Program in Dietetics.

For Limbert, she says it’s a chance to mesh the very practical side of food and nutrition with what you learn in the classroom.

"I learned that frozen fruits don’t have fewer nutrients than fresh. They can actually stay fresher because they are frozen at the peak of freshness