All About Sugar



If sugar is so bad for us, why do we crave it? "High rates of obesity, diabetes, high blood pressure, heart disease: the legacy, some experts say, of sugar." National Geographic traces our love affair with sugar back 10,000 years in the article Sugar Love (A Not So Sweet Story). Learn about sugar's journey around the world, first as a luxury item and later as a household staple, and how the sweet substance affects our bodies and our ...

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Arlington Heights District Brings Healthy New Options to Lunch



Arlington Heights School District, located outside of Chicago IL, has begun bringing healthier options to their schools. They now offer options like poached chicken slider sandwiches, grilled zucchini chips, toasted chickpeas, and turkey meatball soup. They wish to bring these new options to their district in order to provide a healthy lunch, while giving students fun, appealing foods. Arlington Heights has been working on a trial and error basis, even having their first public tasting this summer to introduce the upcoming new menu items. Not all their healthy options have worked in the past, causing them to stop serving fish last year because students simply were not buying it. This school district is also changing it's overall offerings. By bringing in more fruit and ...

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Study: Program Helps Latino Families Eat More Fruits, Drink Less Sugary Beverages



A successful program that increased the number of fruits and vegetables eaten and decreased sugary drink consumption by 50 percent among Latino children had two secret weapons, according to a new study. The first strategy is family values and togetherness. The second guiding principle was "mas y menos"—a little more, a little less. "Interventions often fail because their goals are too lofty. If someone tells me that ice cream is the root of my problem and I can't eat any more of it, I'll be disheartened and say I can't do this," said Angela Wiley, a professor of applied family studies at University of Illinois. "If someone says, would you be willing to eat ice cream two days a week instead of five, or eat light ice cream instead, I would be more willing to try." In Wiley's ...

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Latino Prostate Cancer Survivors Connect, Bond Thanks to Navigator Project



Brotherhood is a term for a close-knit system of support and friendship among men. In Spanish, this is known as hermandad. For three Latino men fighting to survive prostate cancer, hermandad was a unifying force that helped them through the most difficult challenge of their lives—and it wouldn’t have been possible without the innovative patient navigation project from Redes En Acción: The National Latino Cancer Research Network, which is funded by the National Cancer Institute and headquartered at the Institute for Health Promotion Research at The UT Health Science Center at San Antonio. Guadalupe Ortiz Valadez, age 61. Roman Mejia Hernandez, age 57. Francisco Lopez, age 58. Each man has a different life story, background, and struggle with cancer. But their differences ...

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SNAP EBT now accepted at Las Cruces Farmers & Crafts Market



The Farmers & Crafts Market of Las Cruces now accepts nutrition assistance for a number of healthy foods, thanks to La Semilla Food Center, a nonprofit organization that is spearheading the project. With a grant from the USDA specifically aimed to improve low-income communities' access to farmers' markets, La Semilla worked to get electronic benefit transfer (EBT) machines into the market and also improve other markets in the area. La Semilla has also employed a person to be present at an informational booth where the EBT machines and tokens will be kept. "We've got lots of partners that we're working with for this," said Rebecca Wiggins-Reinhard, Farm to School Director with La Semilla. To get EBT accepted in Las Cruces, they had to work with WIC (Women, Infants ...

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Health Impact Assessment of Proposed Changes to SNAP



The Health Impact Project, a collaboration of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and The Pew Charitable Trusts, recently released Health Impact Assessment of Proposed Changes to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), a paper that summarizes findings from an ongoing health impact assessment being conducted to provide nonpartisan analysis of the potential health impacts of the proposed changes to SNAP, the federal government’s principal program for helping low-income families purchase enough food. Read more about the report ...

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Latinos Promote Health on National Youth Advisory Board



The Alliance for a Healthier Generation recently announced the roster for its Youth Advisory Board, one of the only youth-led advisory groups in the country focused on childhood obesity issues. These youths, which include several Latinos, play an integral role in advising and providing a youth perspective to the Alliance as it strives to encourage young people across the nation to make healthy choices. Board members also serve as national spokespeople for the Alliance speaking at local and national events, interviewing with journalists and health-education experts, engaging with community leaders, and addressing their peers. Each board member also must start healthy changes in their own neighborhoods and school districts by engaging in service-learning programs in their ...

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Webinar: Bringing Everyone to the Farmers’ Market



Check out this informative webinar from ChangeLab Solutions about how low-income communities can improve their access to farmers' ...

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Help Healthy Small Food Retailers in Your Neighborhood



In most communities, convenience stores are a common part of the retail landscape – and in many areas, both urban and rural, these stores are the only nearby places to buy food. Can you think of one in your area? What if they served more than just chips, candy, and soda? "Health on a Shelf",  ChangeLab Solutions' guide to healthy small food retailer certification programs, is an extensive toolkit that takes folks through the process of creating and sustaining a healthy small food retailer program. By establishing a healthy small food retailer program, government agencies and community-based organizations can support and give incentives to food retailers (including corner stores, bodegas, and rural markets) that are willing to sell healthy foods. Programs offer a range of ...

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