Super Sprowtz turns Lutheran HealthCare green

For once, veggies were shown an immense amount of appreciation, a huge contrast compared with what they usually receive around the dinner table.

Greens stole the spotlight on Thursday, December 19 at Lutheran HealthCare’s Sunset Park Family Health Center for Women and Children where the launch of a partnership between Lutheran HealthCare and Super Sprowtz was celebrated. The goal of the partnership is to educate Lutheran’s pediatric population and their families about healthy eating and healthy living.

The event kicked off with speakers who stressed the importance of healthy food consumption and revealed the purpose of the partnership. Super Sprowtz CEO and founder Radha Agrawai and Dr. Alfredo Rabines from Lutheran relayed the importance of healthy nutrition in children’s lives to the crowd of various ages.

“Lutheran has a mission to make a change with nutrition and preventative medicine so we are very proactive with it in our department,” said Rabines. “This project came about as an idea to join forces with an organization that does it as well. We’re really taking a big step into the future to try to prevent kids from becoming sick when they really could become stronger with the vegetables and food that they eat.”

The program is being funded by corporate sponsors, Riva Precision Manufacturing and KA Design Group, and the Lutheran Medical Center Auxiliary.

Geared mainly towards children, the program’s mission is to teach its audience about how consuming vegetables can assist in physical growth and strength. It also encourages staying active through fun ways of maintaining health.

The hour-long launch was hosted in the center’s waiting area where approximately 30 P.S 503/ 506 students gathered on mats while behind them in chairs sat sponsors, Lutheran staff and neighborhood residents.

The event provided the audience with a taste of how the program plans to engage children and families in waiting rooms through a fun, age-appropriate curriculum which features an engaging multimedia approach including books and puppets that convey the story of the vegetable superheroes better known as the Super Sprowtz.

Through the program, Agrawai aims to, “inspire families to eat better but doing it in a non-preachy way, doing it through stories, fun, music and culture.”

Super Sprowtz members Brian Broccoli, Colby Carrot and Roger Radish took to stage to perform a set of four songs that included their rendition of Carly Rae Jepson’s 2012 number one hit “Call Me Maybe,” as well as their own rendition of Beyonce’s 2008 number one hit “Single Ladies (Put a Ring On It).” The songs’ original lyrics were heavily edited in order to promote the Super Sprowtz theme of healthy eating.

Laughter and joy filled the room as the Super Sprowtz heroes danced and sang their veggie eating anthems.

In addition, in between the songs, there were skits that encouraged audience involvement and even their own version of a popular game show retitled “Are You Smarter than an Eggplant?”

The Super Sprowtz also taught their audience a few calorie-burning movements that were disguised as dance moves in order to promote staying active.

“We’re so thrilled with how it turned out,” said Agrawai. “Ultimately, the goal here is to partner with a hospital through the health care system to really prevent obesity, and the only way we’re are going to do that is to start from the system, start from the inside out.  So we’re going through a really fun, multimedia approach but through systems that already exist. So I could not be happier.”

By the end of the performance, the room was filled with smiles from people of all ages.

Super Sprowtz is already in schools in New York City but Lutheran Health care is the first health care organization to bring Super Sprowtz in.