Behavioral therapist Zack Shurson likes to end his week by stopping at Belmont Cragin’s Grillicious to pick up an order bursting with color: the diabetes-friendly dish.
It’s a plate of chicken shawarma with a bed of yellow rice, sprinkled with a large heaping of bright green lettuce, purple onions and juicy tomatoes.
“To have something that’s healthier versus other fast foods that I would go to eat, I would notice afterwards, I’d feel so gross. I’d feel so lethargic,” the 35-year-old Shurson said of his former diet. “I love the food here. It’s a healthier alternative than what I used to eat in the past.”
The nutritional value of the dish helped him lower his cholesterol and move away from prediabetes.
But the menu offering didn’t exist last year. That’s when the social services organization Northwest Center started working with restaurants in Chicago’s Belmont Cragin neighborhood to offer healthier options as a way to fight the growing rate of diabetes in the community.
The program started small with seven restaurants participating, and its local focus grabbed Lurie Children’s Hospital’s attention. On Friday, the hospital started its new Vibrant Kids initiative in Belmont Cragin, working to curb the disproportionately high rates of diabetes in the northwest neighborhood.
A troubling trend
Mónica Bianco is a pediatric endocrinologist with Lurie. She said the rate of type 2 diabetes has been growing in Chicago over the last 30 years, but it’s increased even more sharply in the few years since the COVID-19 pandemic.
“We started to work immediately to see if there were any communities that we could identify higher, higher risks. And of course, those communities were located on the South and West Sides of the city,” Bianco said.
The Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago in Streeterville. On Friday, the hospital launched an initiative in Belmont Cragin to curb the disproportionately high rates of diabetes in the northwest neighborhood.
Anthony Vazquez/Sun-Times
According to the hospital’s data, between 2015 and 2021, the ZIP code for Belmont Cragin (60639) had 50 juvenile patients receive a type 2 diabetes diagnosis, by far the highest rate of any ZIP code in Chicago. The area with the second-highest number of new juvenile diagnoses was 60085 in suburban Waukegan, which saw almost half the number of cases at 29.
Part of how the hospital chose where to focus its efforts is a community health needs assessment.
“We see a really high need in Belmont Cragin, Austin and Hermosa when we look at it in a couple of different ways,” said Stephanie Folkens, Lurie’s director of food, activity and nutrition initiatives.
The hospital saw each neighborhood had a disproportionate number of kids using the emergency department and that children in these neighborhoods had low scores on the childhood opportunity index. That index measures the quality of resources and conditions available to a child, such as access to healthy food and green space.
To address the issue, Lurie knew it had to go close to home.
Dishing out health
In 2022, Northwest Center received funding from the Illinois Public Health Institute to partner with local restaurants on diabetes-friendly options, making it easier for people to eat healthy in the neighborhood. The grant was renewed for another year.
Community workers were careful to keep the effort centered on the neighborhood and accessible by asking restaurants not to reinvent the wheel.
“We didn’t want to change what (the restaurants) had in house, we didn’t want them to outsource ingredients. We wanted them to use whatever they had. And not only that, we also wanted them to be culturally relevant,” Northwest Center community health worker Vince Aponte explained.
Getting the effort off the ground took a lot of door-to-door campaigning. Aponte and his colleagues visited a variety of restaurants in Belmont Cragin, including taquerias and mom and pop shops, to chat with waitstaff and restaurant owners about their vision for the program.
Each restaurant has the creative license to develop its own diabetes-friendly dish. Although the restaurants are different, there are common threads to the dishes themselves: more protein, more vegetables, and less simple carbs.
Minerva Velásquez owns Taqueria IZTATL on Cicero Avenue, formerly known as Rolando’s Tacos. Her restaurant serves a diabetes-friendly spin on a classic taco plate.
“The community is responding really well, because they’re liking the meals. We’re introducing it to our clients, and the clients are responding well,” said Velásquez in Spanish.
The community-focused model started by Northwest Center will be a cornerstone of Lurie’s Vibrant Kids program, too.
So far, 24 children are registered for the program, which will work with families who have members experiencing prediabetes or diabetes. It will include one-on-one counseling, group lessons with a registered dietician and visits to Belmont Cragin restaurants for their diabetes-friendly dishes.
This week, participants will eat a healthy meal at Taqueria la Paz on Armitage Avenue while learning about nutritious beverages and selecting food when away from home.
Bianco said the overall goal is to see a decrease in type 2 diabetes in children.
“That is something that takes time,” Bianco said. “I do not expect to see that within a couple of years or anything like that. It is something that will be a slow change, but ideally that would be the ultimate goal.”
Adora Namigadde is a metro reporter at WBEZ and hosts the morning episodes of The Rundown podcast. You can follow her at @adorakn.