By Claire Corrigan
Mullingar Community Training Centre have applied for their Gold Healthy Eating Award after receiving an Irish Heart Foundation Healthy Eating Award at the Royal Hospital in Kilmainham recently.
A nutritionist from the Irish Heart Foundation visited the centre to lay out the criteria they needed for the centre to receive the award. “They gave us a list of the things we had to do and could not do. She came back after a few months and assessed us again and informed us that we had won the award,” said Catering Instructor, Patricia Doyle.
Patricia told Topic that she has always encouraged healthy eating and the pride she and her team take in preparing healthy meals. “I’m here 18 years and I’m always trying to promote healthy eating. We were doing fresh food salad every day for the trainees and doing really health food anyway. We don’t do chips or anything deep-fat fried. So then I heard about the Happy Heart Award and decided to go for that and applied. We got it the first year.”
This week the Irish Heart Foundation has announced plans to expand its long-standing workplace Healthy Eating Award to include three levels from 2016 – bronze, silver and gold – to further drive standards in relation to healthy food choices for staff restaurants. “We’re going straight for gold because we are dong most of the stuff anyway. We don’t eat any processed food here and everything is made fresh every single day. This morning we did a fresh vegetable and chicken soup and a seafood chowder with salads and cold meats. The ten trainees prepare the food for 60 people every day.”
At the Foundation’s presentation of awards to 92 companies, the national charity said workplace health is more than a ‘tick the box’ exercise and it can be used very effectively to increase productivity, reduce absenteeism and to boost overall morale and positivity.
Vice President of the Irish Heart Foundation, Prof Declan Sugrue, said: “Serious health problems face us as a nation, with heart disease and stroke at the top of the list claiming more lives than any other cause of death in this country. The good news is that 80% of cardiovascular disease is largely preventable but tackling these diseases is more than a matter of individual responsibility.”
