Cooking schools improve nutrient intake patterns of people with type 2 diabetes.

Objective: To determine whether cooking classes offered by the Cooperative Extension Service improved nutrient intake patterns in people with type 2 diabetes.

Design: Quasi-experimental using pretest, posttest comparisons.

Setting: Community locations including schools, churches, and senior centers.

Participants: One hundred seventeen people with type 2 diabetes, from diverse ethnic and socioeconomic backgrounds.

Intervention: Series of classes for people with type 2 diabetes and their family members that incorporated Social Cognitive Theory tenets. The classes featured current nutrition recommendations for people with type 2 diabetes and hands-on cooking, where participants prepared and ate a meal together.

Main Outcome Measures: Three-day food records, completed prior to attending cooking schools and 1 month after, were used to measure changes in energy intake and selected nutrients.

Analysis: Program efficacy was assessed using the Wilcoxon signed-rank test to compare differences between pre-training and post-training variables. ANCOVA was used to determine whether program efficacy was affected by sociodemographics.

Results: Participants decreased (P < .05) intakes of energy, fat grams, percentage of calories from fat, saturated fat grams, cholesterol (mg), sodium (mg), and carbohydrate grams.

Conclusions And Implications: Nutrition education incorporating hands-on cooking can improve nutrient intake in people with type 2 diabetes from diverse ethnic and socioeconomic backgrounds.