Better nutrition can cost less, prevent expensive health problems and be nearly as fast as fast food, says Mary Flynn.

The Providence Journal / Gretchen Ertl

Mary M. Flynn of Narragansett was sitting on the beach at Bonnet Shores, visiting with a woman from Philadelphia who wanted to talk about nutrition.

Flynn, who holds three nutrition degrees, teaches at Brown University and at Miriam Hospital studies the effects of nutrition on chronic disease, had learned by serving on the board of the Rhode Island Community Food Bank that donated food is distributed by weight.

Ten pounds of soda going out to food pantries and soup kitchens counted as 10 pounds of food, the same as 10 pounds of canned vegetables.

Which has more nutrition? And which is more likely to be consumed by people at risk of going hungry?

Flynn knows that choosing the soda instead of the vegetables can lead to medical problems and the hunger/obesity paradox –– why some of America’s poorest are overweight.

She wanted to change that.

The woman on the beach in 2006 posed a question: “If we gave you $5,000, what would you do with it?”

Flynn said she wanted to teach people on food assistance to eat more vegetables.

“MOST OF THE FORMAL research on nutrition education,” says Andrew Schiff, executive director of the Rhode Island Community Food Bank, “shows that it doesn’t have a major impact. If you hand somebody a form that says ‘Eat more fruits and vegetables,’ it doesn’t work. It doesn’t help anything.”

But Flynn, whom Schiff described as “phenomenal at translating very complicated nutritional research into simple language that everybody can understand,” is succeeding.

The woman, Claire Black, donated $5,000 to the food bank and Flynn developed a proposal. As she worked, she saw that the plan would cost an additional $3,000. Her mother gave her that by asking for donations to food charities in lieu of flowers after she died, which was last July.

Flynn’s plan was based on her confidence that once people tasted the food, once they saw how easily it went from pantry to table, once they noticed their skillet’s sudden talents, experienced the extra energy, slept the better sleep and felt their well-being on the upswing, they would gladly keep eating vegetables.

IN HER PROPOSAL, olive oil would be a star instead of just an understudy. Major roles would go to canned or frozen fruits and vegetables, instead of perishable produce that starts losing nutrients the moment it is picked, which is often 10 days before it arrives in a New England grocery store.

And she wanted to work with bread and pasta made from whole grains.

The program was called Raising the Bar on Nutrition, and the $8,000 was spent on printing the recipes and her ideas for buying and using food and having the literature translated and printed in Spanish as well. The money also paid for all the food for the participants to make three meals a week, for four people, for eight weeks, and to pay each of the pilot participants $5 a week for using the ideas and reporting back on how they worked.

She took her show on the road, to the Poverello Center, a Franciscan outreach agency on Hartford Avenue that serves the needy and poor in Providence, and most recently to the Jonnycake Center, which operates a food pantry and thrift store and provides social services in Peace Dale.

Her message: Better nutrition can cost less, prevent expensive health problems and be nearly as fast as fast food. And it can taste like what you get in a high-priced restaurant.

FOUR STUDENTS celebrating their success at the close of the eight-week pilot program in Peace Dale shared a potluck dinner on April 15.

They talked about the big difference that small changes have made in their diets and filled out surveys designed to measure whether they were eating more meals at home, eating more fruits and vegetables, spending less on food and cooking more meals without the flesh of animals, poultry, fish or seafood.

The answers were all yes.

Flynn asked them for feedback because she is trying to get a U.S. Department of Agriculture grant to continue the program. The Peace Dale graduates agreed to help teach the next round of classes.

Each week at the Jonnycake Center, they got a colorful cloth bag donated by Whole Foods that contained a can each of carrots, corn, peas, black beans, some other kind of canned beans, as well as two small cans of tomatoes, a large can of tomatoes, a box each of macaroni and spaghetti, a bag of brown rice, and a bottle of olive oil.

They also received the condiments to give the meals a global spin: Asian, Indian, Mediterranean and South and Central American.

They learned to toast a grilled cheese sandwich in olive oil instead of butter, and to put a serving of spinach inside.

They learned to sauté canned vegetables in olive oil, which deepens and sweetens the flavor.

“Seventy percent of the world doesn’t like boiled or steamed vegetables,” Flynn likes to tell students, whether they are in a cooking class at a food pantry or in a nutrition class at Brown University.

Olive oil helps the body absorb carotenoids, the protein that gives fruits and vegetables their color and fights cancer, she said. The carotenoid in tomatoes is lycopene, a powerful antioxidant.

BEFORE THROWING together her dish for the graduation potluck, Flynn held up a glass measuring cup containing colorful strips of green, red and yellow peppers, the thawed contents of a full bag of sliced frozen peppers.

Usually priced at $1.99, she said, bags of frozen peppers are often on sale for $1.50. Fresh peppers by the pound cost more, and there’s all that waste of stem and seeds. Plus they’re “a dog to cut up,” she said later.

Defrosted, the strips measured about a cup. She tossed them into an electric skillet in which she had warmed olive oil and flavored it with a few cloves of garlic that she had squeezed, without peeling, through a garlic press.

Soon the classroom over the food pantry garage smelled like an upscale restaurant.

Wearing a patchwork apron chosen, she said, because it was one of the cleaner ones in her collection, she told about serving this same dish to guests at her house. She used spinach, white beans, canned artichokes and whole-wheat spiral pasta.

“People went crazy about it,” she said as the class watched her add ingredients to the variation they were about to taste.

Her theory is that canned vegetables and fruit can be donated in food drives, sit on the shelf at a food pantry and wait on a shelf at home until a family is ready to use them.

Perishable foods can’t do that.

Canned and frozen vegetables are processed at their nutritional peak, she said.

Some nutrients are lost in the processing, but the ones that remain “have wonderful health benefits.”

WHAT WORKS, the food bank’s Schiff said, is “seeing her actually cook, with food that’s affordable, and it doesn’t take her hours … She makes it as easily doable for a real working person as possible, and all the ingredients are healthy.

“You know what sells it? She finishes cooking and gives everybody a sample,” he said. “People get it. They are making Mary’s meals.”

He said the program is not a weight-loss diet, although some people find themselves losing excess weight.

Flynn said one of her former students ran up to her recently and “bear-hugged me,” saying she had lost 25 pounds and was spending less money on food.

The hunger/obesity paradox, Flynn said, is that poor-quality food, full of empty fats and sugars, is inexpensive and easy to overeat.

People getting food assistance once a month, she said, might overeat at the beginning of the month and go hungry toward the end. That causes the body to overstore calories.

Happily, the solution is inexpensive, readily available and tasty.

“THE BIGGEST THING for the folks that she’s teaching,” Schiff said, “is that this is an affordable healthy diet that real people can use and switch to,” without having to be in a program for a year.

“She’s showing people in this very hands-on way that they can change their diet and still love the food they eat.”

dnaylor@projo.com