Campers showcase cooking skills

The camp, which is being hosted at Springer Memorial, caters to children four to fourteen who are diagnosed with diabetes or as pre-diabetic and this year, there are 25 attendees. Speaking to The Barbados Advocate, Nutritionist with the association, Nicole Griffith explained the inner working of the camp and the importance of monitoring what they eat. 

 

“At this camp, the aim is to be able to monitor the children. Each child is referred by a doctor and we have nurses and doctors on board to test the children every hour to two hours to see the levels of their blood-sugar. We prepare our own meals here based on each child’s requirement so that we have a control point and we know what they are getting and what is the difference at home.”

 

With the children going through two sessions with the the association’s nutritionists to ready themselves for the cook-off, Griffith stated that they would have been taught the fundamentals. “They would have been taught food groups, portion sizes and meal planning so the cook-off is basically to test the things they would have learned and to see if they can compare what they are doing now to what they have been eating during the week,” she said.

 

With the camp also open to siblings of diabetic children, Griffith added that the main aim of the camp was to groom the children and their families toward proper management of the disease. “Basically that is what we want to instill in them – to be able to manage and to be able to live in society as normal as possible without having too much cases where they are in the hospital because most of them would have been in the hospital at least once.” she said. (MP)