Eating Right—With a Little Help from Your Friends
Food groups make healthy eating a community event
For many Southwest Floridians, joining a food group is proving to be the secret ingredient in the recipe for a healthy diet. Healthy-eating food groups have cropped up across the region from Naples to Punta Gorda, with participants saying that adopting a healthy, more plantbased diet has changed their health—and that a key factor in the success of their new diets has been the social support offered by such groups. By harnessing the power of social media through the use of online meetups—combined with a grassroots movement toward healthy eating—such groups are attracting hundreds of members and growing.
An unexpected family health crisis inspired Linda Berson to found the Naples Green Scene: A Plant-Powered Wellness Community. “My husband had emergency open-heart surgery on his 61st birthday in December 2007,” says Berson. After her husband’s health crisis, she says, “I felt like I had been bamboozled,” as she realized that what she and her husband had thought was a healthy diet actually was not. “We had thought we were conscious eaters, eating a lot of chicken without a huge emphasis on vegetables.” Motivated to change her health—and perhaps save her husband’s life—Berson gave up her successful career in real estate and enrolled in a program to study plantbased nutrition through eCornell University and the T. Colin Campbell Foundation. She earned a certificate in nutrition in 2010 and wrote a book entitled Green Scene Diet.
Embracing what Berson describes as a “whole foods, plantbased, no-added oil lifestyle,” rich in grains such as amaranth, spelt and barley, as well as beans and dark leafy greens such as spinach,
THE FOOD-GROUP CONCEPT HELPS BECAUSE “YOU NEED LIKE-MINDED PEOPLE AROUND YOU—FRIENDS WHO EAT LIKE YOU AND ENCOURAGE YOU.”
—DR. KRISTON KENT
chard and kale, Berson says her husband turned his health around while she dropped enough weight to fit back into her wedding dress. Wanting to share the benefits of a plant-based diet with others, Berson created the Naples Green Scene, a local community focused on healthy eating. Its mission is “to empower our community through plant-based nutrition and cuisine to reclaim their health and vitality.” Its method is to use an online meetup to spread the word.
Berson soon enlisted Maura Piper, a Naples resident who holds a degree in food science and nutrition, as her co-organizer. Together, says Piper, the duo set out “to change the dining landscape of Naples and the surrounding community.” They initially organized monthly potluck-style community gatherings, but Piper and Berson soon introduced what they dubbed the Green Scene Challenge, in which local restaurant chefs are challenged with the task of creating special full, multicourse plantbased menus for the Green Scene group meetings. The concept, says Piper, “has really taken off. Chefs are very receptive, and we get great turnout.” Four-course meals are offered to Green Scene participants at $35 per person. Past offerings have ranged from bean and brown rice saffron tacos to pad Thai made with zucchini noodles, spicy tamarind sauce and mixed vegetables.
“We’re foodies,” explains Piper, emphasizing the culinary appeal of the menus and the fact that you “don’t have to be vegan to attend the events; you just need to be interested in
eating more plant-strong foods. Don’t think about it as giving up foods; think about adding in.”
Another Southwest Floridian, Punta Gorda–based Linda Formica, was inspired by the success of Naples Green Scene in launching her own group, the Charlotte County Plant-Based Foodies. At her first event in February 2014, more than 40 people attended, filling the room to capacity. By May, Formica reports there were more than 100 people in attendance and predicts the group will grow to 200 members this year. The reason for the rapid growth of the group, according to Formica, is that “people are tired of being sick and tired.”
Dr. Kriston Kent, a physician who is the owner and medical director of Kent Center for Life in Naples, which takes a nutrition-based approach to health care, agrees that a “plant-based diet is the single diet that can give you the healthiest life; your genes load the gun but diet determines if you suffer the consequences.” Kent notes, however, that “changing behavior is difficult and a major obstacle toward a healthier diet.” The food-group concept helps because “you need like-minded people around you—friends who eat like you and encourage you.” He adds, “the best time to start working on your health is long before you have symptoms.”
Adopting a more plant-based diet, says Piper, “can be overwhelming, but [at Green Scene] we give people resources, ideas and the opportunity to be social and realize many people are into the same thing.”
For Berson, a plant-based diet is nothing short of miraculous. “People are getting cured, actually stopping cancer,” she says. “People like my husband are curing themselves. It’s like I discovered gold and I want to share it with others—and there’s a movement happening all over the United States.”