Shireen Abdullah: (0:00)

Podcasting from Dallas, Texas, I am Shireen and this is the Yumlish Podcast.

Shireen Abdullah: (0:07)

Yumlish is working to empower you to take charge of your health through diet and exercise and reduce the risk of chronic conditions like type 2 diabetes and heart disease.

Shireen Abdullah: (0:20)

We hope to share a unique perspective and a culturally relevant approach to managing these chronic conditions with you each week.

Shireen Abdullah: (0:29)

Pam Koch conducts research and creates resources on how to get people inspired and confident to make food choices that nourish their body, mind, and spirit.

Shireen Abdullah: (0:42)

Welcome so much, Pam.

Shireen Abdullah: (0:43)

Thank you.

Pamela Koch: (0:44)

I’m happy to be here.

Shireen Abdullah: (0:45)

Absolutely glad to have you on.

Shireen Abdullah: (0:47)

So Pam, thank you for joining our podcast here today. I want to start out by learning a little bit more about what inspired you to really focus your career on nutrition education and improving food systems, because that’s quite unique.

Pamela Koch: (1:04)

Sure, so I started out studying nutrition science in college and realized I wanted to work with people and then realized that teaching people facts about nutrients and nutrition didn’t work at all to have people change what they eat. But experiences that get people inspired to why it’s important to eat healthy as well as to feel confident that they can do it is what seemed to work and get people to want to make those changes for themselves.

Pamela Koch: (1:38)

Then why did I focus on food systems? I also realized through my studies and particularly through the program here at Teachers College, where I currently work and also as a student, that we can’t just think about what happens to food after it gets into our body.

Pamela Koch: (1:54)

We have to think about everything that happens to produce our food before it gets to us, because how our food is treated depends on what’s in our food. We eat foods that come from plants and animals or ingredients derived from plants and animals, and they’re complex living beings just like us. And so what are going to be all of the chemicals or what’s called phytonutrients in the plant foods, will vary based on how that food is treated.

Pamela Koch: (2:29)

There’s a book that’s called, and I’m going to look at the title to make sure I get it right, is What Your Food Ate: How to Heal Our Land and Reclaim Our Health, by Anne Biklé and David Montgomery. And I’m not promoting this book per se, but I think just the title gets you to realize that we have to think about how our food is produced. And not only does that directly influence our health, and I believe we’ll never really understand all the complexities of that, it also affects the health of our planet and our ecosystem that we depend on to produce our food.

Shireen Abdullah: (3:07)

You know, at Yumlish with our work that we do a lot of it being in diabetes prevention. You know, food is, of course, at the center of it. We talk a lot about how food environments and cultural food practices also influence health. From your perspective, what are some of the biggest barriers you would say communities face today when it comes to accessing nutritious foods?

Pamela Koch: (3:29)

So we are currently living in an environment where across different communities, even different communities in the same city or region have really different access to the foods that nourish us. And what’s even more important is all of us tend to have, because of what our general food supply is, have a lot of access to the foods that tend to be less nourishing.

Pamela Koch: (3:52)

These foods are also really specifically engineered to be delicious, that they peak everything in our brains that makes us want to eat more and actually really does peak things that make our bodies want to eat more.

Pamela Koch: (4:05)

They’re also really heavily marketed with really creative advertisements that make it seem like these foods are fun and enjoyable. They’re also foods that are convenient just right out of the box or bag to eat them. And due to our farm policy, and this is really only due to our farm policy, these foods tend to also be relatively less expensive per calorie than other foods. And that inequity is even more so in places where there are limited resources.

Pamela Koch: (4:40)

So less access to the foods that will create that nourishment that we need to be healthy today and tomorrow, but then even more of a higher saturation in those foods that we all would want to eat and basically would enjoy eating because they are engineered to just be really delicious.

Shireen Abdullah: (4:58)

You know, what are much of your work, by the way, examines these food systems and what people are able to eat. What are some of the, you would say, structural or even social drivers that lead to such inequities in food access and nutrition.

Pamela Koch: (5:14)

So think about the fact that if you’re running any kind of company that’s selling food like a grocery store, that you’re going to have to make sure that you’re meeting the bottom line, right, that it’s economically viable to do this.

Pamela Koch: (5:31)

And so where would somebody setting up a grocery store want to set up is in a place where they feel like people are going to have the resources to be able to purchase the foods that they have there so that they can be economically successful.

Pamela Koch: (5:46)

And, of course, that is what we want. It’s much harder to have a store where you’re having people that may not have as many resources or it may not be as easy for to get to. And so that ends up setting up structural barriers.

Pamela Koch: (6:01)

The same thing is true for farmers markets. That would be a place that people can get fresh and local foods as well as have that ability to interact with the people that are growing those foods.

Pamela Koch: (6:13)

And where, if you were taking a truck, bringing your food in from a farm and selling it, where would you want to be?

Pamela Koch: (6:21)

You would want to be in a place where you’re going to sell out of your food, right?

Pamela Koch: (6:24)

You want to go home with none of that fresh food left.

Pamela Koch: (6:29)

So that makes it really hard to have equal access to food in all places.

Pamela Koch: (6:34)

In New York City, which happens to be where I live, we have a program that’s called FRESH and FRESH stands for Food Retail Expansion to Support Health.

Pamela Koch: (6:45)

And this is actually to set up tax incentives for people and other economic incentives for people to be able to have grocery stores in underserved communities.

Pamela Koch: (6:58)

That way it gives an advantage to the person that’s selling the store there, an economic incentive and advantage to be able to have the food there also in New York City too. And again, I think that these are things that other places could practice as well. Our mayor who started on January 1st of 2026, Mayor Mamdani, has been really calling for city run grocery stores in communities that don’t have these because those will also have the government supports and not have to have as much concern about meeting that bottom line. And I think it’s programs like that that can really be incentives for people to be able to have that access to food across all communities.

Shireen Abdullah: (7:41)

You know, you mentioned access as this potential driver. Can you talk a little bit about some of the others? And then which of these drivers do you think is most urgent to address now?

Pamela Koch: (7:52)

Yeah, I think what’s most important to address now is really having people really believe that what’s important is that we need systemic changes, not an approach that is looking at it as individual responsibility. That is like we’re saying, well, people, everybody could eat healthy. It’s just that some people, those people maybe are not choosing to do so.

Pamela Koch: (8:20)

And so we really want to see it as a system problem because then if we believe that it’s the system that is making it hard for people to make those choices that nourish them, then we actually believe that what we need is those systemic changes that will lead to that ability for everyone to be able to eat well.

Pamela Koch: (8:41)

I want to share one other thing that I think is really interesting is I have one of my doctoral students who’s actually defending her dissertation next Monday, so just in a few days. And what her dissertation was was looking at national data from something called NHANES, which is the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey. It’s actually national data that’s been collected for a long time and probably if you’ve read any studies or heard even on the news studies that are talking about like what Americans eat, there’s a very high likelihood that it came from the NHANES data.

Pamela Koch: (9:16)

What she is specifically looking at, my doctoral student is looking at children from 5 to 12 years old and looking at data of what they ate from 2001 to 2023. So a pretty long time period. And that age of children, 5 to 12 years old, basically what people can eat is what’s available around them. That’s what we can do.

Pamela Koch: (9:41)

So she was looking at the percentage of calories that those students, or not students, well, they might have been students in schools, but those children, those 5 to 12 year old children, were eating what are called ultra-processed foods. And ultra-processed foods are foods that have a longer list of ingredients. They’re the ones that I was talking about before that tend to have ingredients that make us want to eat more heavily marketed, available, and long ingredient list.

Pamela Koch: (10:06)

What she found is that of those children and there was 13, almost 14,000 children that she had data on. Right. 13,850 to be exact. What she found is 1% of those children had diets that were below 10% ultra-processed foods. But 6% of those children had diets that Were over 90% of the calories from ultra-processed foods. And the average was 66.

Pamela Koch: (10:40)

So it that doesn’t show anyone’s individual choices. That shows that’s the food that’s available and that’s the food that children are eating. And to me that is a really clear call to action. We need systemic changes to change what’s available in all of our communities. So everyone has that opportunity to have foods easily that are the foods that will nourish them and allow them to eat well.

Shireen Abdullah: (11:07)

A follow-up question to that that comes to mind, Pam, for me is, are there examples you can point us to for communities or local policies, for instance, that you’ve seen begin to address some of these inequities in a meaningful way?

Pamela Koch: (11:22)

Yeah, so a while ago I was working on a project that was called Food and Fitness, and we were looking at communities in New York City that had fewer opportunities for eating health-promoting foods as well as to be involved in physical activity. And one of the communities that we were working in is a community in Brooklyn called Bed Stuy, which is known as a community that tends to have people with fewer resources.

Pamela Koch: (11:52)

And there was an organization there that actually had a little farm basically in Bed Stuy that was the space of two brownstones, so basically like this space of two houses that they were growing food for the community as well as a food pantry. And they wanted to have a farmer’s market. However, farmers were saying, just like I said before, like, oh, I don’t know, are we going to be able to sell out if we go there, and is it going to economically work for us?

Pamela Koch: (12:21)

What they ended up doing was having a place where farmers could bring their food. And then it went out to. It got divided up and went out to several smaller markets in the communities that would have enough foot traffic to be able to sell out. And then what they did is they set up a farmer’s market and made it not only a farmer’s market, but also a community-based place and event for people to come to. So one of the people and the couple that was running this was an artist and she set up art activities for kids to do while at the farmer’s market.

Pamela Koch: (12:56)

There also was somebody in the community who was a yoga instructor and when the weather was nice would do outdoor yoga classes at the farmers market.

Pamela Koch: (13:05)

Another person came and said, “Hey, I love to run. Why don’t we have this be a meeting place where we can have people who want to go running together in the community and start a running club.” So it became this hub of a place in a community that worked.

Pamela Koch: (13:21)

And just to share something really sad is while I was doing this work, unfortunately there was a teenager who was shot and killed in the community. And we got right back to the farmer’s market. Not the very next time that it was could have been, but the next time after that it was a Saturday market. And so not that week of the. That horrible incident. And everyone said we wanted to come back to the market because we needed to see each other and we needed to be together and come back together as a community. So it shows how these food-related places, where people are celebrating culture and community and eating well together, end up being really important spaces for communities.

Shireen Abdullah: (14:04)

It’s just remarkable the footprint and the role communities can play. And speaking of which, what role can schools play in shaping lifelong healthy eating habits for children, even for families? And then are there community programs or initiatives that you’ve seen successfully improve nutrition and specifically food access?

Pamela Koch: (14:24)

Yeah. Okay, you might have to remind me of that second question, but I’ll answer the first question first about schools. And that is where most of my research takes place.

Pamela Koch: (14:33)

So I really believe that a lot can be done in schools. I think that there’s a lot of research that shows that the eating habits that we establish as children don’t necessarily have to be our eating habits that we have for life, and that very often they do become the eating habits that we have for life.

Pamela Koch: (14:52)

So I think that when we can really establish healthy eating habits as young children, they can actually continue throughout our lives. So most schools in the United States and as well as other places in the world have school meals. There’s a lot of history with school meals in, in the United States. And I personally believe that children learn a lot about food and eating and our relationship with food through school meals. That could be really positive, and it might not be so positive. Right?

Pamela Koch: (15:30)

So picture walking into a cafeteria where there is… everybody’s talking, everybody’s enjoying being there, but it feels calm, it feels inviting. The people that are giving the food are doing it with a little conversation with the students, encouraging the students to take all the foods, talking to them a little bit about it. Maybe their teacher, right before lunch read the menu to everyone and said, can’t wait to hear about what you thought of that chickpea and kidney bean chili and green beans that you had for lunch or whatever’s being served. Right. And then we’re going to talk about it after lunch.

Pamela Koch: (16:10)

That compared to an environment where the kids are dropped off at lunch and it feels like a very chaotic place. They are eating quickly to get outside for recess, and it’s not really focused on eating. Those are really different kind of messages that the students are learning from that. So I think that we can use school meals to celebrate having really great food, connecting it with something like a school garden, which is like the farm to school program, when we can, as well as having really great food and nutrition education in schools.

Pamela Koch: (16:48)

And to go back to, my very first answer was what I learned really early on is teaching people facts about nutrients and teaching kids what vitamins are and something is not going to change how they eat. However, when they get hands-on experiences with food and get to touch that food and use all their senses to explore it and then do something to prepare it and then eat it together and talk about it and maybe talk about a food that might be used like, I don’t know, eggplant, right? Like that is used in so many different cultures around the world. And to talk about like, oh, my family prepares eggplant this way, my family prepares it that way. Whatever it is that is going to get to food.

Pamela Koch: (17:32)

And I’ll just share one really concrete example, and that is I was involved with a program that was an art education program that was also having kids explore food. So they were doing art about food and getting to draw food. But then also there were really great lessons where they were getting to try food and talking about seeing that food in the cafeteria, and very, very much focused on vegetables. And we had an art show at the end of the program so that the kids’ art could be on display and all their families could come and see the art.

Pamela Koch: (18:05)

And I was talking to one of the moms of one of the children who was part of this program, and she said, well, I had to come to this because this has changed our family’s eating and it’s changed my experience in the grocery store with my child. Now they can’t wait to go to the produce section and say, ” This is this food. Can we buy this?” “I had that. This is this, this is that.” And she said, I had to figure out what kind of program got kids excited about vegetables.

Shireen Abdullah: (18:32)

And isn’t that something? Right? Because normally, you know. The constant challenge is getting kids to eat vegetables or getting them to do. But now this is almost flipping it to where they have a keen interest in. In the food itself. So how. How awesome is that? And I think. I think you answered this question, but I’ll phrase it to you anyways, which was the second part of what I asked you, which was community programs, in particular, initiatives that you’ve seen successfully improve nutrition and in food access.

Pamela Koch: (18:58)

I think in general, it’s anything that’s going to make the foods more available. But I will say that food and nutrition education in schools, what has been shown that makes it work in general is one when  So, for example, that program that I just talked about, the goal was for kids to eat more vegetables, right? We never went in and never once said to the kids, hi. We’re here to do this program, which was called Art and Healthy Living. We’re here for Art and Healthy Living to make you eat more vegetables. Right?

Pamela Koch: (19:32)

It was never said. But everything we did was to have the kids feel like they wanted to do it for themselves, not because adults were telling them, because they saw the benefits, they saw the excitement and that they were trying foods and learning about foods, that they felt confident they could. So knowing what it is you want to change, whether or not you tell that to the audience or not, and then getting them inspired to want them to do it for themselves, having them feel confident that they can change.

Pamela Koch: (20:02)

And then the last part is to be able to navigate through our challenging food environment because it’s challenging for everyone, more challenging for some, but challenging for everyone. And to be advocates for change. And those are the things that work in schools. That’s for everybody. In schools. What’s even more particularly important is connecting it to the curriculum and having it across the curriculum and connect it to school lunch.

Shireen Abdullah: (20:27)

What are some simple ways people can start improving their relationship with food and nutrition? You know, we’ve got folks on, you know, who are listening to us or watching us help provide some advice there. And what advice would you really give to communities that want to advocate for better access to healthier foods?

Pamela Koch: (20:47)

Well, first, on a personal level, we all have our own relationship with food and very often it becomes emotional and sometimes more like feeling guilty or bad. So first, give yourself grace. Realize you’re doing the best you can in all situations and enjoy all of the food that you are eating. Whatever it is, enjoy every bite of it. Instead of eating it and saying, oh, I shouldn’t be eating this, just enjoy it. Because that actually brings eating better or eating more for nourishment.

Pamela Koch: (21:21)

The second is for advocating for change. Find the places in your community that are already are doing some good things, like a place that’s selling vegetables. And if you want them to expand that, tell them that it’s much easier for some place that’s already doing something to change it and do more. The same thing is if you don’t have a farmer’s market in your community, but there’s one pretty close by, visit there and say, why don’t you have a farmer’s market in my neighborhood? What could we do? And get other people to do that too, because if enough people are heard, then I think changes can be made.

Shireen Abdullah: (21:54)

That’s very helpful. We are unfortunately Pam towards the end of this episode. At this point, I would love for listeners to know a little bit more about how they can connect with you and just stay informed of your work.

Shireen Abdullah: (22:06)

Sure. So you could follow me on LinkedIn. I’m not a super active poster, but I do post to do some posts, so you could certainly follow me on LinkedIn. But then also all of our work is done through the Laurie M. Tisch Center for Food Education and Policy. The website’s pretty easy, so tc.edu/tisch. So you could certainly follow all of the school-based work there, especially as well as the other work that we’re doing.

Shireen Abdullah: (22:42)

Lovely, thank you so much for your time. Really appreciate it. With that, I’ll hand it over to our listeners. Thank you so much for listening to another episode of this podcast here today. We want to continue the conversation with you on social media. So head over, excuse me, to our social media and you’re going to follow us at Yumlish on Instagram or at Facebook and find this podcast.

Shireen Abdullah: (23:05)

Post a comment below to tell us again what changes would you like to see in your community that would make it easier for families to access healthy, culturally meaningful foods? Again, head over to social media, find us on Facebook or Instagram, find this podcast post. You’re going to see our faces on it. Find this podcast post and answer this quick question, which is what changes would you like to see in your community that would make it easier for families to access healthy, culturally meaningful foods?

Shireen Abdullah: (23:35)

We will continue the conversation there. Pam, thank you so much for your time. It was an absolute pleasure.

Pamela Koch: (23:40)

It was a pleasure to be here, and you’re welcome.

Shireen Abdullah: (23:44)

Thank you for listening to the Yumlish podcast. Make sure to follow us on social media at Yumlish underscore on Instagram and Twitter and at Yumlish on Facebook and LinkedIn for tips about managing your diabetes and other chronic conditions and to chat and connect with us about your journey and perspective. 

Shireen Abdullah: (24:04)

You can also visit our website, yumlish.com, for more recipes, advice, and to get involved with all of the exciting opportunities Yumlish has to offer. If you like this week’s show, make sure to subscribe so you can hear more from us every time we post. Thank you again, and we’ll see you next time. Remember, your health always comes first. Stay well.

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Connect with Dr. Pamela Koch !

LinkedIn URL: www.linkedin.com/in/pamela-koch-14-tccu 

Website URL 1: https://www.tc.columbia.edu/faculty/pak14/

Website URL 2: https://www.tc.columbia.edu/tisch/

Website URL 3: https://www.tc.columbia.edu/health-studies-applied-educational-psychology/nutrition/