Nutritionist Has Food for Thought for Ghetto Kids

It pains Jacinto Rhines to see every kid in South Los Angeles using so much of the white stuff. He wrings his hands. They’re killing themselves, he says. It sucks the energy out of them, makes them do crazy things.

Rhines isn’t talking about cocaine. He’s talking about sugar.

Much of society has chosen to express its concern for children by telling them to say no to drugs. Rhines, a trim, goateed man of 48, digs deeper. From his cluttered one-bedroom apartment atop a back-yard garage in Southwest Los Angeles he runs a one-man nutritional education campaign aimed primarily at depressed neighborhoods.

Road to Trouble

The way Rhines sees it, poor kids, particularly poor black kids, don’t learn enough about nutrition, living in neighborhoods dominated by crumbling mom-and-pop stores, fried chicken shacks and liquor stores. They eat a lousy diet, and so they feel lousy. They become used to that feeling and their self-esteem crumbles and they become ripe targets for mischief, crime and drugs.

Rhines’ mission is to reverse that chain. And so he teaches health-food rap songs to elementary school classes. He passes out good-nutrition coloring books at housing projects. He visits juvenile halls to counsel children. He lets recovering cocaine addicts live with him while they try to clean up their lives.

He takes welfare mothers on shopping trips, teaching them how to stretch their dollars on the right kind of meals. He strides into the offices of accountants and bank presidents, demanding that they underwrite his crusade for the good of society. He holds no job, supporting himself and his 14-year-old son with welfare checks, raising about $40,000 a year to finance what he calls Nature’s Hot Line. He has lived this way for the last 10 years.

It sounds like saintly work. But Jacinto Rhines is no saint.

“I got a Ph.D. in mistakes,” he says earnestly. “I got two Ph.Ds. in mistakes.”

Rhines was born in Washington and came to Los Angeles 21 years ago, chasing a golf ball. He was a very good golfer who had visions of making the pro tour, but he couldn’t quite qualify. For a while he made a living working as a golf instructor at a course in the San Fernando Valley. Then he caught on as a fund raiser for a civil rights organization. The money was enough to allow him to live in Malibu, but he was a troubled man. He was smoking two packs of cigarettes a day, eating too much food and chasing too many women. Ultimately, he would go through three marriages.

A Stroke of Luck

At one point in this up-and-down existence, as he was approaching 30, Rhines had the good fortune to run into a musician named Willie Jones. Rhines was out of work, had a broken arm and had broken up with his second wife. Jones, a decade older and fond of the notion that all men are redeemable, saw a troubled soul and began to preach the gospel of nutrition.

“This was the guy who inspired me to feel good about myself,” Rhines said. “I was at a low point and he told me, ‘You’re a really beautiful guy.’ I didn’t think I was a nice guy. I thought I wasn’t too good a guy.”

Jones had felt strongly about the relationship between behavior and diet since the ‘50s. Those instincts have been borne out in the ‘80s by a number of studies correlating improved behavior with a decreased consumption of sugar and so-called junk foods.

A number of juvenile correctional institutions have significantly cut antisocial behavior by substituting fruit juices for soft drinks and nutritious snacks for high-sugar foods. Other studies, while not conclusive, have indicated that an improved diet influences the brain’s chemistry and seems to control behavior.

Rhines didn’t buy into all of Jones’ tips right away, but he did start to pay more attention to what he was eating and did notice that he felt better. By 1978 he became fed up with the workaday world and decided to use his fund-raising experience for his own cause, Nature’s Hot Line. Ever since, he has spent most of his time trying to convince people to give him a few hundred dollars here and there to take the most basic of nutritional tips to people who need them most.

Alex Kyman, president of Beverly Hills-based City National Bank, was sitting in his office a few years ago when Rhines walked in out of the blue.

“He told me white people were obligated to redress the wrongs done to blacks,” Kyman said, still amused by Rhines’ audaciousness. “He was an arrogant S.O.B. who wound up getting just what he wanted. We’ve been supporting him ever since. He’s dedicated.”

What Rhines did in Pomona one evening a couple of weeks ago was typical of how he spends the money.

In the gym of the Pomona Boys and Girls Club, Rhines, his son Kenneth and two young men from his neighborhood passed out corn chips and frozen coconut juice bars and self-published booklets of health-food recipes and poems about nutrition and self-esteem to 40 parents and elementary school-age children.

Spread the Word

Speaking through a microphone hooked up to a small guitar amplifier, Rhines recited one of his verses:

There is no greater wealth

Than my life and good health,

And the love and respect

That I feel for myself.

He began to talk, lashing out at a world in which so many adults are convinced that so many kids are slaves to the lure of fast money.

“If we go around valuing money over health, that’s not a good way to go,” Rhines said. “What good is money if you don’t enjoy waking up every day? How many of you are glad to be alive today? Nature says everybody in the world is important. . . . The gang member, he doesn’t feel that way about himself. He doesn’t love himself. The young man selling cocaine in the park, he doesn’t feel that way. He thinks it’s all about money.”

As Rhines prepared to leave, one of the young men who had accompanied him took the microphone and recounted how he nearly killed himself on cocaine.

“He did a Len Bias, he just didn’t die,” Rhines said outside the gym, referring to the college basketball star who died of a drug overdose two years ago. “There’s a whole lot of potential Len Biases out there, kids who are intelligent, sharp as a tack, but they don’t have a good self-image, don’t have that self-esteem because nobody ever taught them that they by themselves--without the degree, without the money--were something. The whole society gears everybody towards materialism, towards the degree, to be important, not to think you’re important without that. That’s the missing link right there. That is why we got to start building that self-image, first in ourselves, then passing it on to these kids.”

Lessons to Learn

Even after he began Nature’s Hot Line, Rhines had to learn some of those lessons. He was not hooked on drugs, he says. He was hooked on sex. Women to him were objects to be used, and his habit eventually backfired. He was convicted of rape in 1981 and served two years in state prison.

“I didn’t love myself,” he said, sipping a glass of homemade lemonade seasoned with honey and cayenne pepper. “The prison thing was a good experience because it made me face myself. And today it lets me say to children: Don’t let anyone condemn you because you make a mistake. In any classroom I speak, there’s nobody in that room who feels any worse about themselves than I did as a young person.”

Being a convicted felon puts Rhines in a touchy position. He knows that some organizations may not want to deal with him once they know his background. He says he is willing to take his chances and be judged by his sincerity.

“Look,” he said, gesturing to a wall where he had hung resolutions of commendation recently received from Mayor Tom Bradley, the City Council and the county Board of Supervisors, each praising Rhines for his grass-roots work. “For me to go from prison to that is an accomplishment.”