Peer-led nutrition education gives college students a healthy start

December 10, 2025

College is a period when many students encounter the challenges of independence for the first time. Budgeting, health management and meal preparation can be difficult to juggle alongside academic, job and time commitments.

Dr. Jessica Soldavini gives a cooking demonstration.

To help college students level up their nutrition skills, UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health expert Jessica Soldavini, PhD, MPH, RD, LDN and Gillings alum Marlee Caregnato, MPH, RD, LDN, are working with the Carolina Hunger Initiative (CHI) to develop and pilot a special kind of culinary education curriculum: one that will be taught for students by students.

“Many college students haven’t built those foundational cooking skills, so this is a good opportunity for them to learn,” said Soldavini, who is assistant professor in the Department of Nutrition and the UNC Center for Health Promotion and Disease Prevention. “Food insecurity is also a big issue in college. This curriculum is meant to teach students how to prepare healthy meals on a limited budget and within time constraints.”

Over the summer, Soldavini and Caregnato led an internship for Master of Public Health (MPH) students, training them on curriculum and recipe development and preparing them to lead cooking and nutrition education sessions for students and young families. Interns created lesson plans and participated in community events, including tabling at a family fun day carnival held by Families and Communities Rising. Meals included chicken with rice, grain bowls, roasted vegetables and more – all which included easy-to-find ingredients that meet current dietary guidelines.

Dr. Soldavini and her students at the farmer’s market event.

Soldavini says the curriculum’s peer-led emphasis stems from research on the benefits of learning from your peers and the importance of learning from someone with experiences that can relate to your own. The internship has the added benefit of providing MPH students an opportunity to put their learning into practice in local communities.

“This is an easy way for students to get hands-on experience, to build teaching and nutrition skills that they can add to their resumes,” she explained. “With the added benefit of developing those skills right here on campus.”

MPH student Jordan Cole participated in the summer internship as part of her practicum and said the experience resonated with her in a meaningful way.

“As someone who grew up food insecure in the deep south, I had to teach myself about proper nutrition, budgeting for meals and culinary techniques as I made my way through undergrad,” she said. “A curriculum like this one would have been extremely valuable for me in that time, and I am so happy to have worked on it so that other students like me can feel less misguided when navigating this area.”

A sample grocery list and cost analysis worksheet from the peer-led cooking course.

Cole, who worked in fine dining for a few years and has a deep love for cooking, said the experience allowed her creative side to shine. “My favorite parts were recipe testing and filming recipe demonstration videos. My experience also ended up being a slight setback for me, because I was trying to create more technical recipes and use high-level terms in the recipes when our audience was meant to be mostly beginners. This feedback helped me remember to always keep the audience in mind in every step of creating an intervention—or a curriculum!”

Cole found the work so meaningful that she wrote a poem about the experience in her critical reflection.

While the curriculum, which is funded thanks to the United States Department of Agriculture, is currently being piloted at Carolina, the ultimate goal is to create a program that can scale to campuses across N.C. By equipping students with practical cooking skills and nutrition knowledge, and doing so through peer-led learning, the program aims to make healthy eating more accessible, affordable and achievable for college students everywhere.

This work is supported by the USDA National Institute of Food and Agriculture.

Contact the UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health communications team at [email protected].