In Mexico, Healthy Cooking Series Attracts an International Audience

The Seventh-day Adventist Church in North Mexico, together with Montemorelos University, has recently launched a healthy cooking program on social media that has drawn attention from many countries around the world.

Coined as “Healthy Kitchen,” the program includes recipes based on foods in the church’s banner initiative “I Want to Live Healthy,” which incorporate ingredients of vegetable origin.

“Our main objective with programs like this is to motivate people to live with physical, mental, social, and spiritual health,” said Roel Cea, health ministries director for the church in North Mexico and director of Montemorelos University’s Health Promoter University program. The cooking program is part of a comprehensive evangelism plan. He said it is intended for church members to share with friends and neighbors to motivate them to pursue a healthy lifestyle. 

The cooking series has 15 episodes, and each episode is 14 minutes long. In every episode, a recipe is introduced that uses ingredients easily found in Mexico and most of the Americas and presented with a connection to spiritual health, organizers said. The online program began on October 5 through the church’s Facebook and YouTube channels and “I Want to Live Healthy”. 

After the first three episodes were aired, the “I Want to Live Healthy” Youtube channel had nearly 10,000 views, organizers said.

Many online viewers from around the world expressed their gratitude for the cooking program.

“Greetings from Costa Rica. I am so happy to follow your recipes,” commented Wendy Picado. “I have really liked them. I am a Seventh-day Adventist, but I don’t know much about healthy cooking, so I’m now learning.”

Marcela Viera of Barcelona, Spain, commented: “The program will be of great benefit to the entire family … I’m so very happy.”

For Blanca Estela C., the recipes were nutritious, affordable, and easy to prepare.

Juliaemy Heilbron, director of the I Want to Live Healthy Community Center and one of the presenters of the Healthy Kitchen show, said the program had been a wonderful experience, not only learning how to prepare the dish but learning about the nutritional content of each ingredient used. “I have learned to appreciate the most common nutrients that are good for us in each recipe and be thankful to God for all these nutrients He has provided for our integral health,” she said.

At the end of the cooking series, church leaders in North Mexico will follow through with a special family life series and a Bible study program coined as “Let’s Look in the Bible,” coming in mid-November.

The original version of this story was posted on the Inter-American Division news site.