Expanded Food & Nutrition Education Program (EFNEP)

The Expanded Food and Nutrition Education Program (EFNEP) provides a series of eight practical, hands-on, multilingual nutrition lessons from the Eating Smart•Being Active Curriculum for limited-income parents of young children.

Learn more

EFNEP Flyer

Phone (650) 276-7426

Email cesanfrancisco@ucdavis.edu

In California, EFNEP has been administered by the University of California Cooperative Extension for fifty years, using a holistic nutrition educational approach. As a result of participating in EFNEP, individuals and families experience improvements in four core areas:

• Diet Quality and Physical Activity—Improved diets and nutritional and physical well-being through the adoption of federal food and physical activity recommendations
  
  
• Food Resource Management—Increased ability to buy, grow, or otherwise appropriately obtain, prepare, and store food that meets nutritional needs
  
  
• Food Safety—Improved household food safety and sanitation practices
  
  
• Food Security—Increased ability to get food directly—and from food assistance programs where necessary—to ensure having enough healthy food to eat

June 15, 2020

Ola soy Catalina Maya Martínez y en lo personal ami me alluda el programa en esta cuarentena gane peso mis pantalones llano me estaban hice un cambio en mi alimentación y esta fue un día empecé acomer en salas de verduras cosidas en agua y otro día comida mesada con menos tortillas desde que comenzó la clase astoy pues llabi la diferencia llameseraron los pantalones y llano no tube la necesidad de comprar pantalones nuevos Gracias por las clases.

Hello I am Catalina Maya Martinez, personally this program helped me in this quarantine. I gained weight; my pants were no longer fitting me. I made a change in my nourishment and one day I started eating more salads with vegetables cooked in water and started to eat with less tortillas. Since starting the class, I started to notice the difference with my pants that started to fit me again and I did not need to buy new pants in a bigger size. Thank you for the classes.

January 14-March 10, 2020

JLV is a 43-year old gardener in San Mateo. He is from Mexico and lives with his wife and son. He attended EFNEP classes every session with great enthusiasm. When I taught about eating more vegetables, he could not believe that he could have been growing vegetables in his backyard. What shocked him was that he does this for a living! He asked me about how much coke he can drink a day and I told him none because it is got too much sugar and it is not healthy especially for him that is doing physical work as a gardener. I recommended mineral water to keep him hydrated during the day. Around the 7th class that is Building Strong Bones, he showed me the mineral water that he switched to from coke. He also so said that he is trying to make his wife cook healthier foods, which is interesting because it is usually the wife that tries to make her husband eat healthier. The ladies in the class had fun with her by telling her to listen to her husband because they wish their own husbands would accept change like her husband. He also decided to start to grow some vegetables because he realized it would save him money long term. On the last day of class, he told me that his sister is in my class at Nesbit Elementary School and he told her she better pay attention because he learned a lot from my classes.

This success story is from my PAL-San Mateo Police Activities League.

Contributed by a SMSF EFNEP Nutrition Educator