HHS launched a new web portal providing important health and health care indicator data. The Health Indicators Warehouse represents a vast collection of health and health care indicators like determinants of health, health care access, cost, quality, and use. Health indicator can be searched for specific populations, places, political jurisdictions, and geographic areas. The Warehouse [...]
What’s the most important thing we can do to ensure a good birth outcome? During the 1980s and 1990s, public health focused on the importance of prenatal care and ensuring that every woman got into prenatal care early in the pregnancy and continued with consistent care throughout the pregnancy. Programs like Health Start enlisted lay [...]
Every year that goes by brings more solid information suggesting that the body mass index (BMI) may become the future leading health indicator. If you’re wondering what BMI is; it’s your weight in kilograms (Kg) divided by the square of your height in meters (m2). There’s solid evidence that BMIs in the upper 20s and [...]
The Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act of 2010 became law this month. This reauthorization of the federal school nutrition program includes a number of elements that will help move the needle on childhood obesity. The Act recognizes the importance of school meals to the health and academic success of kids and gives school nutrition programs new [...]
Previous studies have found a link between not getting enough sleep and an increased risk of obesity in adults and new research this month suggests that sleep deprivation could be a powerful factor for obesity in kids as well. A new study in the Archives of Pediatric and Adolescent Medicine found that toddlers that got [...]
You probably think I sound like a broken record because I’m always writing about obesity… but it really is the dominant public health issue of our time. Last week, the CDC released its latest Vital Signs report called "State-Specific Obesity Prevalence Among Adults – United States, 2009,"… which finds that nine states had an obesity [...]
The Trust for America’s Health released their annual obesity report. Overall, the national trend toward increasing obesity rates continued it’s march forward. Arizona ranked in the middle of the pack, but the pack itself in increasingly unhealthy. More than two-thirds of states have adult obesity rates above 25 percent. In 1991, no state had an [...]
This week, I'm sharing the CDC's 5 Winnable Battles as set forth by the new head of the CDC), Dr. Frieden. During the next 3 years, CDC will be increasingly focusing its strategic planning on public health and policy interventions to help win the 5 “Winnable Battles”. There’s not much on the CDC’s website yet [...]
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 [...]
A couple of weeks ago, I mentioned that 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 includes the reauthorization of the free and reduced lunch and breakfast [...]
