As the new year quickly approaches, many of us will be making resolutions to improve our lives. There are four simple things you can do to improve your health in 2016: eat healthier meals, be more physically active, quit smoking, and get screened for cancer. Today we will focus on simple things you can do [...]
Whether you’re hosting a Thanksgiving celebration or attending as a guest, you can help make the healthy choice the easy choice for your friends and family. Consider making a healthier version of an old favorite to share. This recipe for Corn Bread Crusted Turkey would go great served with this slightly modified recipe for a [...]
September is Childhood Obesity Awareness Month and is a great time for us to take stock of where we are in the "Winnable Battle" of combatting obesity. Last month, we got some good news from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) that obesity rates in children and adults are leveling off after decades [...]
Here’s some good news about the battle against the obesity epidemic: national data shows the average intake of calories has decreased for boys and girls over the last 12 years. While the news is encouraging, our work to promote nutrition and physical activity to reduce obesity remains important. Reducing obesity is a Winnable Battle both nationally and [...]
This week the Association of Maternal & Child Health Programs gave us the National Best Practice Award for our Empower Program. As a refresher for those of you that aren’t familiar with Empower… it’s a program we started in 2009 that focuses on increasing healthy eating and active living in our licensed child care facilities… [...]
It is hard to believe we’re in the 3rd year of our successful Empower Program. As a refresher for those of you that aren’t familiar with Empower, it’s a program that focuses on increasing healthy eating and active living, along with helping to provide smoke-free environments, in licensed child care facilities… reaching over 200,000 children [...]
Registered Dietitians are on the front lines of our battle against obesity. They work everyday to help people understand the importance of balancing diet and exercise - not necessarily an easy task in this junk-food, drive-thru world. Some of them are really good at it - including our own Adrienne Udarbe and Maricopa County's Trudes Rodriquez. The Arizona Academy of [...]
Make sure you check out our maturing community garden on the east side of the 1740 building. The tomatoes are doing very well and producing now. I ate some celery yesterday which was good too. New plants are showing up all the time as folks pitch in. If you have a garden at home or [...]
It’s always best to lead by example. We’ve been encouraging community gardens for years and now we have one! After much hoping, dreaming and planning the community garden is finally a reality. In October, Jonathan Manning from Elgin Nursery came out to help us break ground. We added compost and cottonseed meal to a long [...]
Congratulations to our Bureau of Nutrition and Physical Activity for their grant award announced this month from the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials Leadership for Healthy Communities program. Over the coming year, we’ll be strengthening our capacity to make a dent in childhood obesity by conducting a health impact assessment to prevent childhood [...]
