Arkansas Leads Nation Halting Childhood Epidemic

Soon, Arkansas children will be able to spend time in the school gym after school, on weekends and during the summer. Communities will have more readily available access points for locally grown fresh produce. And schools will represent the central core of the neighborhood again instead of being allocated to the outskirts of the community.

Working in collaboration with researchers, advocates and other partners, these strategies represent the most promising ones in Arkansas to prevent childhood obesity.

"Already, we remain the only state in the nation that can show we've halted the childhood obesity epidemic," said Arkansas Surgeon General Joseph W. Thompson, MD, MPH, a pediatrician and director of the Arkansas Center for Health Improvement (ACHI) and the national Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Center to Prevent Childhood Obesity, and an associate professor in the UAMS Colleges of Medicine and Public Health. "Other groups are showing similar progress, for example, the Los Angeles School District. They've made many of the changes we've implemented statewide, and they've halted the epidemic. But we're still the only state to do so. Halting progression is a good start, but there's still much to do to reach our goal of reversing childhood obesity."

Physicians have clearly recognized the threat that obesity represents beginning in childhood, said Thompson, "but frequently our clinicians are frustrated by the fact that so much of it isn't a medical problem but rather an imbalance between consumption of food and drink—and the energy expended in physical activity. What if all that was needed to balance the scales was a mere 110 to 165 fewer calories a day? And what if the solution lay with creating policies that would make our children's communities and schools healthier places?"

ACHI, which was instrumental in developing and implementing one of the nation's first successful statewide obesity-prevention programs, is striving to shift environmental factors so that the healthy choice becomes the easy choice.

"Right now, the healthy choice is the hard choice, whether it's the food you're offered when you go out to eat, or the food available in the grocery store, or the ability to go for a walk safely away from traffic," said Thompson. "That's what we're working on outside the doctor's office."

In 2003, the Arkansas General Assembly passed legislation that changed food offered in schools to provide more nutritious meals, reduced empty calories by eliminating non-nutritional snacks from vending machines on school grounds, and increased the physical activities for children during their school day.

"Now we've got to extend these changes to communities in which our families are spending their time," Thompson said, "so that healthy food options are available and there are more opportunities to be physically active."

For example, with economic stimulus funding, the Centennial Trail along the Arkansas River has been lengthened. ACHI supports menu labeling opportunities that both the House and Senate have incorporated into health reform bills so that restaurants would have to provide calorie counts and nutritional information.

Locally, ACHI has been working on ways to stimulate farm-to-market and farm-to-school opportunities so that fresh produce is available in community grocery stores and school cafeterias.

"We're working with Wal-Mart to get similar opportunities for locally grown produce to be more readily available," said Thompson.

To make eating healthy the easier choice for Arkansans on supplemental food assistance through the Department of Human Services, SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program) has been extended because of the economic downturn.

"We have more people enrolled in SNAP than ever before," said Thompson.

Even though requirements for food acquired via SNAP include some type of nutritional value, fat content isn't monitored. "We're working with federal officials through the RWJF (Robert Wood Johnson Foundation) Center to address ways to either incentivize or require people to acquire more nutritious food."

The WIC program was recently expanded to offer parents the option to buy fresh fruits and vegetables with WIC vouchers, and to purchase milk that's non-fat or 1 percent fat. "For a long time," Thompson noted, "the WIC program only allowed you to buy whole milk, which is pretty fatty."

The Arkansas Coalition for Obesity Prevention—representing the Department of Health, Department of Education, ACHI, UAMS and other institutions across the state, community leaders and business partners—has helped expedite achieving program goals, Thompson said.

"In the pipeline and something no other state has done is the joint use agreement, funded by the tobacco tax increase the state implemented in 2008," he said. "The agreement partners local community organizations with their school districts to open gyms on Saturdays, after hours and during the summer so that kids have a place to go play to increase physical activity. That program has not yet rolled out, but will be coming in 2010 from the Department of Education on a competitive basis.

"Physicians on school boards or working with community groups will want to know about the availability of these partnerships.

Tags:

Bookmark:

Facebook

Technorati

Newsvine

Google

Related: