907-P: Diabetes-Inspired Culinary Education (DICE): An Innovative Approach to Type 1 Diabetes Management through Culinary Medicine

Despite the critical role nutrition plays in T1DM management and growth/development, youth with TIDM consistently have poorer diet qualities compared with their healthy counterparts. While culinary medicine is an area of research that is still in its infancy, initial studies have demonstrated success in improving youth diet quality and dietary and disease management outcomes in individuals with T2DM. Yet despite its great potential to elicit positive behavior change among youth with T1DM, this area of research is under-explored. Therefore, Diabetes Inspired Culinary Education (DICE), a community-based culinary medicine program aiming to improve diet quality and disease management among 6-14 year old youth with T1DM, was developed and assessed for feasibility and potential efficacy in a pilot study. The DICE program included ten, 90-minute lessons delivered weekly at a community teaching kitchen and included: hands-on, age-appropriate culinary education; nutrition and diabetes education delivered through experiential learning; a group family meal prepared by participating youth; and culinary/mealtime goal-setting. Baseline and post-test outcomes were assessed on participating families at the child- (food preparation self-efficacy (SE), involvement, attitude; dietary intake; diabetes management; diabetes quality of life; hgbA1c; BMI), primary caregiver- (dietary intake; diabetes management SE; mealtime SE; BMI) and family-level (family food preparation; mealtime environment). Feasibility was evaluated using participant attendance, retention and a program-specific fidelity tool. Eleven families were recruited and 8 completed (73% retention) the program. On average, 78% of participating families attended weekly lessons. Improvements in primary caregiver SE for healthy mealtime behaviors (p=0.02) and family food preparation (p=0.05) were observed at post-test, inferring potential program efficacy. Disclosure C. R. Mcmanus: None. H. Barkoukis: None. R. Kim: None. J. Nguyen: None.