Young Publishing Pioneers Help Moms-to-Be Eat Well

Hello. My name is Valentina Simon. I'm a ninth-grader at Montgomery Blair High School.

Hi. My name is Rachel Rosenzweig, and I'm a ninth-grader at Poolesville High School.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

My mom is a midwife, and she realized that guidelines she was learning to teach her patients and the newspapers were reporting different foods where listeria would most likely be.

So when I saw what I was teaching women for food safety that came directly from the guidelines directed by American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, versus what I was seeing in the news media with the recalls-- those things did not match together.

VALENTINA SIMON: She was interested in this discrepancy, but she didn't have time to look at it herself, so she asked us to do that.

We started working at her house looking at all like the different databases, and started categorizing the different data.

One of the reasons that we think there's such an issue with the listeria guidelines is that the three databases don't really talk to each other, because they all have different information. So we came up with a nice little saying-- "If you didn't make it, and you can't heat it, don't eat it!"

So basically we're saying, make your food as much as you can by yourself. Because those raw ingredients go through less processing, and so they're less likely to harbor listeria. Because those processed foods combine a lot of ingredients, and if just one of them has listeria, everything's going to have listeria.

Everything is.

Our food supply is evolving, but the guidelines have not evolved with them, because they've been the same for the last 20 years. And that's an issue.

They're excellent kids. They're good friends. We just feel very lucky that they are both involved in this project. And we'll see where it is in three, four years. I would like to think that it will make a difference and we will see impact.