In an effort to spread the good word about our innovative Empower Pack program, we submitted an article for presentation at the American Public Health Association’s annual meeting this fall. We heard last week that our submission entitled "EMPOWER – Arizona's collaborative leadership efforts in implementing policy on childhood obesity and tobacco use in child [...]
Which city do you think is overall more fit and healthy, Phoenix or Pittsburgh. I won’t give you the answer, you’ll have to go to this year’s The ACSM American Fitness Index Report at http://www.americanfitnessindex.org/ to get the answer. They put this report out every year to help city planners, policy makers, health educators, and [...]
The President signed a Memorandum in February establishing the Task Force on Childhood Obesity and charged them with developing an interagency action plan to solve the problem of obesity in the US. The Task Force included the Secretaries of the Health, Agriculture, Interior, Education, Office of Management and Budget, Assistant to the President and Chief of [...]
Last Wednesday, April 21, the Institute of Medicine (IOM) released a new report on high blood pressure entitled Strategies to Reduce Sodium Intake in the United States. The report was sponsored by the CDC, FDA, and NIH. High blood pressure is one of the nation’s leading causes of death, responsible for roughly one in six [...]
Our child care licensing & rules team, along with a long list of Stakeholders, have been working very hard over the last few months to put together a new list of criteria for operating a child care center. This week, their hard work paid off- and we were able to post a draft of our [...]
Let’s start with a quick quiz on this one… Which of the following food items contains more fat: 2 slices of pepperoni pizza 1 order of large fries 3 glasses of whole milk 8 strips of bacon The answer is 3. 3 glasses of whole milk. If you pour whole milk at mealtime for your [...]
The US Senate Agriculture, Nutrition, and Forestry Committee, passed legislation out of their Committee to reauthorize WIC and the other Child Nutrition Programs last week. It’s called the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act of 2010. The bill http://ag.senate.gov/site/legislation.html includes the reauthorization of the free and reduced lunch and breakfast programs. I was in DC a couple [...]
The US Senate Agriculture, Nutrition, and Forestry Committee, passed legislation out of their Committee to reauthorize WIC and the other Child Nutrition Programs last week. It’s called the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act of 2010. The bill http://ag.senate.gov/site/legislation.html includes the reauthorization of the free and reduced lunch and breakfast programs. I was in DC a couple [...]
Pima County will receive a $16 million grant as part of the national Communities Putting Prevention to Work efforts funded through the federal Stimulus program. They’ll be creating a community-wide set of strategies and interventions to reduce obesity by ensuring safe, attractive accessible places for physical activity and making healthy foods available, accessible, and affordable. [...]
I met with the staff of most of the members of Arizona’s congressional delegation Wednesday in Washington DC at an event called Hill Day sponsored by the Robert Woods Johnson Foundation. I used the opportunity to talk to them about nutritional policy issues like boosting the nutritional strength of the foods that are served under the free and reduced lunch [...]
