Posts tagged childhood obesity
Latina Overcomes Her Own Barriers to Empower Others to Improve Their Health
0Critics didn’t think Rosa Soto would amount to anything because of her lisp. They thought she’d never graduate, or get a good job.
But Soto overcame her lisp, earned a political science and international relations degree from the University of Southern California, and has worked to empower underserved families and children for more than 15 years, according to a new profile story about her by the Healthy Kids, Healthy Communities (HKHC).
Soto is currently the regional director for the California Center for Public Health Advocacy (CCPHA) and the project director for the HKHC project in Baldwin Park, Calif.
“I’m a community organizer. I never thought of myself as a public health person,” she said, although her career spans teen pregnancy, diabetes and now childhood obesity.
Soto grounds herself in family and in helping others find their voice, according to the profile story. Rosa’s parents were immigrants from Mexico.
“A lot of my childhood was about fitting in and finding a place of belonging,” she explained. And she wants others to also feel they belong and can make a difference. That the status quo doesn’t have to remain “the norm.” This work is important to me because it gives me an opportunity to demonstrate that change is possible.”
Read Soto’s full story here.
Video: How You Can Change School Food for the Better
0Parent advocates can use RuddRootsParents.org to learn how to improve the food in their children’s schools.
Watch this video on how it works:
Videos: Latino Families Make Healthy Lifestyle Changes
0Check out these videos of a few Latino families who are improving their healthy lifestyle habits.
A healthy change in her family’s eating habits has influenced eleven-year-old Alejandra to dream of being a chef when she grows up:
When Maya, age 7, learned of her high triglyceride levels, she and her family changed their eating habits to better manage her cholesterol:
The videos are from Be Smart. Be Well.
Get Policy Tools to Improve Children’s Health in Your Community
0Several health organizations are spurring people to create healthy changes in their regions.
In celebration of the recent Food Revolution Day 2012, a global day of action to help fight the obesity epidemic, ChangeLab Solutuions organized a set of policy tools people need to create a Food Revolution in their communities.
Tools include:
- Model policies for healthier vending machines at school
- Toolkits for community kitchens, play space, and more
- Toolkits for fresher foods in schools, such as school gardening programs, farm-to-school programs, etc.
- Model policies for restricting food and beverage advertising in schools
- Know more about federal legislation on new nutrition standards
- Overcome barriers to providing free drinking water in schools
- Learn the importance of the farm bill
Tools can be found here.
The Society for Behavioral Medicine (SBM) also offers a variety so people can hone their advocacy skills. Their recent paper outlines action steps SBM and its members can take to impact health-related public policy, and SBM also offers a variety of policy statements on topics such as childhood obesity and school-based physical activity.
Infographic: Screen Time vs. Lean Time
0The time kids spend in front of a screen for entertainment has increased by an hour and 17 minutes since 2004, research shows.
Check out this new infographic about the surprising amounts of TV, video game, computer and other entertainment screen time that children are getting, and the opportunities for physical activity that they are missing out on. The infographic, from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, also provides tips for healthier activities and ways parents can limit screen time in the home.
Find the infographic here.
For more information, visit MakingHealthEasier.org/GetMoving
WEBINAR: Linking Policies to Improve Public Safety with Preventing Child Obesity
0Leadership for Healthy Communities, a national program of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, will host a free webinar on successful strategies to address both public safety and childhood obesity at 1 p.m. CST on April 26, 2012.
A growing body of research demonstrates that when families feel safe in their communities, they are more likely to engage in physical activity that improves their overall health. By implementing policies that address both the adequacy of a neighborhood’s built environment and implications and perceptions of neighborhood crime, policymakers can address significant safety concerns, promote active, livable communities and reduce childhood obesity.
The webinar will feature:
- Councilmember Ed Gonzalez, City of Houston, Texas
- Deb Hubsmith, Director, Safe Routes to School National Partnership
- Matthew Rufo, Program Manager, Prevention Research Center, Tulane University
The webinar coincides with the release of Making the Connection: Linking Policies to Improve Public Safety with Preventing Childhood Obesity, a report to provide policymakers seeking to address public safety in their communities with policy options that can also contribute significantly to reversing the childhood obesity epidemic.
Register here for the webinar.
Where to Locate Schools? What to Consider – and Why It Matters
2Forty years ago, nearly half of all students walked or biked to school. Now, only 14 percent do.
Why the change?
One major factor is school siting, the decisions school leaders make about where to build or rehabilitate schools. Over the past several decades, schools have increasingly been built on the outskirts of communities, too far from children’s homes for walking or biking to be practical. Meanwhile, obesity rates in children and adolescents have more than tripled, and a third of children are overweight or obese.
Locating schools closer to where families live can make it easier for kids to walk and bike to school—and more convenient for families to use school fields and other facilities after hours, when school is closed. When it comes to ethnicity and socioeconomic status, however, few neighborhoods are well integrated, which means students in neighborhood-based schools can be highly segregated, too.
But there are lots of ways to support both walkable and diverse schools. To help districts nationwide make school siting decisions that support their students’ health and educational success, Changelab Solutions has released a set of model school siting policies and other materials.
Download these tools today, and contact their team for more information.
Making the Connection: Linking Policies that Prevent Hunger and Childhood Obesity
0In the past, food insecurity and obesity were viewed as separate public health problems, yet research now shows that people with unreliable access to food are also more likely to be obese.
A new brief, Making the Connection: Linking Policies that Prevent Hunger and Childhood Obesity, released by Leadership for Healthy Communities, a national program of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, provides policymakers seeking to address hunger in their communities with policy options that can also contribute significantly to reversing the childhood obesity epidemic.
Some of the policy strategies outlined in the brief include:
- Establishing healthy food financing initiatives to increase access to nutritious foods;
- Supporting farm-to-institution, farm-to-school and school garden programs;
- Increasing free and reduced-price school meals; and
- Partnering with the private sector to increase the value of federal nutrition assistance benefits for healthful foods through double-coupon initiatives.
Read more here.









The report, released this week by Trust for America’s Health (TFAH) and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF), also shows that if adult obesity rates continue on their current trajectories, by 2030 all 50 states could have rates above 44% and a quarter could have rates above 60%. With that, the number of new cases of type 2 diabetes, coronary heart disease and stroke, hypertension and arthritis could increase 10-fold by 2020—and double again by 2030.


