Adam Torres and Chef Cathy Zeis, FFA Member.
Subscribe: iTunes / Spotify
Apply to be a guest on our podcast here
Show Notes:
Listen to coverage from the 96th Texas FFA State Convention in Houston, Texas. In this episode, Adam Torres interviewed Chef Cathy Zeis, Principal CEO at Eat Like The Rainbow, Inc. Explore Chef’s experience attending the Texas FFA State Convention for the first time.
Watch Full Interview:
About Chef Cathy Zeis
As founder and CEO of their nonprofit, Eat Like The Rainbow, Inc. Chef Cathy Zeis is dedicated to empowering the future leaders to learn a healthier way of eating.
Chef Cathy Zeis is an all-natural chef who creates healthy food plans for those who are humbled by disease or for those who simply crave a healthier lifestyle.
Full Unedited Transcript
Hey, I’d like to welcome you to another episode of Mission Matters. My name is Adam Torres and I am today at, in the Texas FFA convention in Houston, Texas. And I’m having so much fun in my guest right now, chef Cathy Zeiss. I like to say, Hey, welcome to the show. Thank you so much. It’s a pleasure to be here.
All right. So I know this is one of my favorite things to do every single year heading to the Texas FFA convention. This is my third convention in a row and I’m looking forward already to next year. We still have a. full day ahead of us still. Just have to say, Cathy, what brings you to convention? Well, this is our first year, this is our introduction.
Oh, congratulations! so much, we’re very excited about that. We have a non profit called Eat Like the Rainbow. It’s a educational program, a free educational program at EatLikeTheRainbow. org for kindergartners through 5th grade. And it’s for teachers. It’s already up on our website. And what we do is we fight child obesity.
Wow. Because everybody has to eat. But what we’re focusing on now in the schools is we’re focusing on sports drinks and athletics. But we don’t teach the kids how to feel their body. Yeah. For the exercise and athletics. And a lot of the kids aren’t the athletes. A lot of the kids are the ones who do the math, get the scholarships, work.
You know, work hard in the classroom, but we focus more on the kids that are athletic. Now, is that balanced? I don’t think so, because everybody eats. Everybody eats. The teachers eat, the kids eat, the parents eat, the principal eats, you know. So what we want to do is we want to educate kids starting in kindergarten, because we know that as soon as we set their palate and educate, we’re going to set them by the time they’re in the fifth grade.
They’re set from religious to to the way they eat, to the way they sleep, to their manners, to their study habits. And so food involves everything. And so in our program, we have like, on part of the website, we have a thing called the teacher’s tools and it gives the teachers it gives the teachers like math, math problems for the kids.
And then it has, it has classroom competitions and it has word searches and it has computer games. And the whole time they’re learning about the power of God’s first foods and how the foods that were created for us work in our bodies because Adam. You know, when God created us, He created us on day six.
He created food on days three and five. So He knew how to fuel us. Oh, I love that. And Chef, this is my first, I’ve interviewed a lot of other companies that are here, sponsors, non profits, organizations, but I feel it’s very special that it’s your first time here. It is my first time. And that, I’m grateful to have you on the show because we get to commemorate this and your first time.
So, that being said, why did you feel it was important to come? Like, what was the thing that was like, you know, we need to be there? And I ask that question just to preface it. Because I want to Inspire other businesses, corporations, nonprofits that aren’t here. They should be here. So what’s your story?
They should be here because first of all, it has to do with the kids. Yeah. And another thing it has to do with, we’re not just saying everybody has to eat . And so the number one person in this, in the world is the farmer, because that’s where we get our food from. And if we educate the people. How we’re eating, why we’re eating the way we are, and maybe we can find childhood obesity when we take it back to the ground roots, when we take it back to the farm, when we take it back and learn about FFA, and just the power of food and how it can work in our bodies and change our lifestyles.
We’re in a horrible situation right now, Adam, with, with chronic obesity with children. There are kids as young as five being, you know, diagnosed with diabetes and heart disease because of the processed food. Yeah. And we don’t want to take the time to educate them and go, listen, this is what it does for you, especially lower income kids.
And that’s what we love about this program, about our non profit, is that we are hoping to find a sponsor who’s gonna go out there and believe in us and say, look, We want to help the point of sale. We want to put our name behind you. So when these moms bring home the coding page of Adam Apple, and it goes, look mom, Adam Apple likes Jif peanut butter as his afternoon snack, we can give them that coupon to go buy that Jif, so they know that it’s been It’s been looked at, it’s healthy, you know, an apple is great as a snack, it’s God’s source, it’s powerful fiber, full of antioxidants, but when you add something as wonderful as protein as Jif peanut butter, you have a superfood.
Okay, so it’s little programs, little things. Little things like that that we’re teaching the kids through our Elector and Go program. The kids are going to remember and they can associate with. Where did the idea for the program come about? How’d that come about? Well, I’ve been a chef, I’ve been in the food business over 40 years.
So I work with people who are humbled by food. So, I work with people who have cancer, heart disease, obesity, so I’ve really specialized in meal plans that help people, so the combinations of the foods and how they work in their body. So, so as God put all this together for 40 years, and I started working with these people humbled by disease, and then started seeing the chronic problems of obesity, then the children came up, and I was like, now we are in a pickle.
Because now we have a generation that we’re leaving breadcrumbs for that aren’t healthy breadcrumbs. These are breadcrumbs that are fast food. Through a drive thru. We can’t win that war, Adam. Yeah, yeah. We can’t win it. But we can educate the kid through the Eat Like the And we can play a different game, like this.
And we have it on an app. And we have an Eat Like the Rainbow app, where the kids have a computer game that takes them through the top five drive thrus in the country to teach them how to order. The healthiest things off of that. It’s a game. Yeah, they get awarded. They get little banners and buttons and stuff on that because I said we can’t beat that, but we can’t educate them and we can’t make it fun.
And it’s okay because you know, it’s 80 20. God wants us to enjoy our food. Absolutely. And it’s 80 20, but if we can educate him, then maybe we can break it, and educate him in a fun way, teach him how to eat in a fun way, and it’s okay, then it’s fun, and then maybe we can break that trend that is childhood obesity, because we’re losing the world right now, Adam, and we can’t afford to do it.
What is, and this is just, I’m not exactly clear, so educate me, when we say kids or childhood obesity, like what ages are we talking about? We’re talking about age 14, and we’re talking as young as 3 and 5 are being diagnosed with diabetes and heart disease. That young, that young, that you, that wasn’t like that.
No, it was not like that. No. And so when we hit COVID and all these kids were put in lockdown and they couldn’t play and they’ve lost all that well, and the parents were thrown into this whirlwind of, I have to stay home and teach and they lost that education. Now we’re trying to put makeup or trying to get them out there and get them to learn.
But instead, this is what we’re doing, so we’re going to go in their world, and we’re going to give this to them, the Educam. But that’s when it started happening, and so, and the more we get comfortable with our phones and fast, everything’s fast, we got to feed, we got to feed, we’re going to go through the drive thru.
A lot of people don’t even want to stop when they go through the drive thru. They just want to slow down and grab the bag. But we’ve lost that, bring it back to the table. Come on, let’s do it. Let’s eat some grapes because you know some of the best candy you’ll ever have in the world is what God is what God created.
And Adam, you know, sugar will last in your body an hour, one hour. So as you give a kid a donut as they’re going out the door, they’ve got it for an hour. You give a kid Some grapes and a glass of whole milk. That’s another thing we do wrong in schools. Because kids need whole milk. Because their brains are still developing.
They don’t need the 1%. They don’t need the 2%. They need the whole cow milk. To help the brain and the bones. And so, if we can do that. Give them a glass of whole milk. Give them some grapes. You know, grab some honey and a piece of hot chocolate. Man, Chef, you’re making me hungry right now. That sounds delicious.
Another thing, Adam, God made most of the great foods for us portable in one serving. Think about that, banana, an apple, an orange. Oh, that’s, I never thought about that. Hold on, so God already had our serving size down? He did. He did. I don’t know, I’ve never thought of that in my life. I’m a meal planner too.
Not like you that actually, where your meals actually taste good. But I do meal plan just to make sure that I’m healthy. But and I’m measuring things. But it never occurred to me that God already had our serving size down. And it’s, it’s not a horse drop, you know, he didn’t want us to go, he wants us, he wants us to leave.
He even packaged the banana, stop chef, I never thought about that, that’s a, you, you made my day. And now I’m thinking about this too when you, when you take a banana and you turn it upside down it makes kids happy. We know that part of the banana helps calm down depression, helps calm down ADD, ADHD, so every teacher in the classroom should have bananas.
So when the little boy or girl says, come on, we know. We give them a banana and it literally cost them. God made the food. Yeah. He created us. Yes. He, he gave this program to me. It’s my responsibility to educate and to share it, and to help, help these kids, because they’re our responsibility. That’s on us.
And it’s our responsibility to take care of them. And you know I was, you know, I was talking about, we’re looking for somebody to help us, Adam, you know, and, and. When the Wright brothers decided to fly, they didn’t have a degree in aviation. It was ridiculous what they did. They were going and they made it happen.
That’s amazing. Yet they flew. That’s what he liked the rainbow as. Wow. Sometimes you’re just the first. And working with these kids in these schools, we’ve been doing this for about seven years, and seeing some of these kids go, I’ve never seen broccoli. But you’re like, hey, look, feel the top. You know what that feels like?
It’s like your brain. And they’ll go, oh, brain. Now we’ve made an association. Yeah. Broccoli, brain, think. It’s good for you. So it’s, it’s all about texture, teaching the kids, showing them, because kids learn, and kids also eat with their eyes. So if you show them and educate them, and let them have fun with it, let them feel the broccoli, let them feel the apple, and that’s what we do when we go in the classroom.
It’s amazing the locks that you can change. Oh, I love it. Well, chef, this has been so amazing having you on the show. What I want you to do is I want you to look into the camera and tell everyone how they can follow up, how they can support, how they can learn more. Please. We would love to hear from you at EatLikeTheRainbow.
org. It’s a free program already out there. We also have an app on the App Store and Google Play called Eat Like the Rainbow. And what you can do with that app, it’s free, is you can go into any grocery store, anywhere in the world, Scan the barcode, and it will tell you if it’s good or bad for you and tell you why.
And so if you need vitamin D, you hit the vitamin D, it’ll give you all the foods for vitamin D. If you hit My Kid Needs Some Protein, you hit protein, it gives you all the foods for protein. We also have a budget thing, so if you only have 50 or 25 a week to spend, we tell you what you can buy with that because food is so expensive.
Now, we’ve given you that list. And if you don’t know how to cook chicken, you hit chicken. It takes you to another website, ChefCathyZeiss. com. It gives you a free recipe on how to make the chicken. It tells you how it works in your body. It’s all free. We did it because we want to take care of you. And we know it matters.
It’s EatLikeTheRainbow. org. Eat Like the Rainbow. At the App Store or Google Play. And I’m Chef Cathy Zeiss. Amazing again, thank you chef and to the audience as always. Thank you for tuning in Hope you had a lot of fun listening this one. I sure had fun making this for you And just so you know, this is a daily show So if you haven’t hit that subscribe or follow button definitely do that because each and every day We are bringing you new episodes new thought leaders new mission based individuals to help Inspire you along in your journey as well.
That’s what this is all about So again hit that subscribe button and until the next time Thanks, Adam. Thank you so much.