In Houston, Texas, 53 percent of voters agreed that many Americans can not afford healthier foods and better food policy needs to ensure that everyone can have access to nutritious foods. According to research from Food Policy Findings in October 2015, 75 percent of voters favor incentives to promote sustainable farming and 45 say that healthy foods need to be more affordable for Texans. Recipe for Success Foundation, a non-profit that focuses on combating childhood obesity, is working to address voter priorities by asking for a "Veg-olution" to fight for a healthier food system. Working to get people involved they have asked companies, schools and communities to join VegOut! and get schools active with the Seed-to-Plate Nutrition Education. If your company is interested in ...
The Board of Education in the Miss. Dept. of Education voted on Thursday, February 18, 2016, in support of the Smart Snacks Standard, making nutrition and healthy choices easier for students to access within the school. Part of the change allows the schools to ban junk food fundraisers, such as doughnuts, pizzas and candy bars. Along with this, small training grants will help boost school wellness councils that support healthy school changes. According to Preventobesity.net, the grants will give 100 schools a $3,000 grant to support healthy habits across schools. See how offering healthier options in schools for Latino kids may help their health, here! To read more about this change, click ...
"More than 40% of Latino children in the U.S. are growing up overweight, that's almost half of all Latino kids in the country, those kids are at risk of developing serious health problems like asthma, diabetes and heart disease," said Marissa Ortega-Welch of Latino USA on a recent radio show. In the mainly Latino populated school districts of Oakland, Cali. schools are taking healthier school foods a step further, banning junk food from school property. Most schools across the U.S. are working on implementing the standards of healthier school lunches but many kids and or parents still opt for lunches from home, allowing junk food to be a part of school's food environments. In Esperanza Elementary (98% Latino) most of the school kids are under the free and reduced lunches, so ...
Tazeen Chowdhury, Food Services Director at Mt. Lebanon School, is helping to show the nation what kids love about healthy meals at school. Invited to meet with politicians in Wash. D.C, during the Senates reconsideration of the National School Lunch Program, Chowdhury has paved the way for implementing healthier foods into the Mt Lebanon School District. She has been recognized as an example to lawmakers of how a nutritional food program can be implemented for success. Chowdhury said in a recent article that she was happy that legislators and policy makers want to hear from people in the field, the ones actually planning the menus and preparing school lunches. Chowdhury has seen for herself how kids love eating fresh foods at the salad bar like kiwi, avocado, and ...
Editor’s Note: This is the story of a graduate of the 2015 Èxito! Latino Cancer Research Leadership Training program. Apply now for 2016. Jasmin Berrios
Houston, Texas Taking a cue from her father who worked hard and still made time to spend with his family, Jasmin already applies those same values to her own career and personal life. Her hard work shows: she’s the first from her family to get college degrees, and she’s already developed a great knack for improving research methods. Throughout life, Jasmin has made a difference in her community by volunteering in various community organizations; this helped her realize how a public health approach could make a greater impact. Jasmin received her bachelor's in Health from Prairie View A&M University and her ...
Linda Joseph, a special needs teacher in Florida, with some of the highest drowning rates in the country, wanted to make sure her students could swim and weren’t afraid of the water. As someone who values whole-child health, Joseph knows that water safety boosts confidence and opens doors to many water-based physical activities and associated mental and physical benefits. She went to a nearby pool for information and learned about and enrolled her students in free water safety education lessons through SWIM Central.
Fear of Drowning is High in Florida Linda Joseph, a special needs teacher at Lauderdale Lakes Middle School, in Fort Lauderdale, Fla. (13.7% Latino), lost both of her parents to a drowning accident when she was 16. She became fearful of water and didn’t learn to ...
Derek Dimas, a registered nurse had a fun idea to get kids to eat healthier. Believing that kids needed a fun and positive environment to learn about fruits and vegetables, he invented a program called "Fun with Fruits." While in their physical education classes, students within the Corpus Christi School district learn how to create easy-to-make fruit and veggie kabobs. Dimas also invites parents to attend the classes, hoping to inspire healthy eating for the whole family. In a recent article, Dimas explained the need for this type of program, "I felt moved because these kids may not outlive their parents because of obesity. I've heard of three-year-olds with diabetes and young people with heart disease," he said. Dimas spends his own money to provide the fruits, vegetables, ...
Eagle Mountain Elementary School, in Ft. Worth, TX (34.1% Latino), is tripling their time for recess, from 20 minutes to one hour, during the 2015-2016 school year as part of a project to model the Finnish school system. The project’s designer is Texas Christian University kinesiologist Debbie Rhea. She recognized that not only do Finnish students consistently score at or near the top in international education rankings, but that Finnish students also get more time for recess than American kids. Recess will be four times a day for 15-minutes. Teachers were concerned about losing classroom time at first, but see that kids are fidgeting less, more focused, and learning more. “If you want a child to be attentive and stay on task, and also if you want them to encode the ...
A webinar focusing on a new report from Healthy Eating Research will be presented on Wednesday, February 10th 2016, at 12pm CST. Healthy Eating Research is a national program funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) that supports research on environmental and policy strategies that have strong potential to promote healthy eating among children. The free, 1 hour webinar will be on Minimum Stocking Levels and Marketing Strategies of Healthful Foods for Small Retail Food Stores. Presenters include Professors and Research Assistants of the University of Minnesota School of Public Health and Tracy Fox, President of Food, Nutrition & Policy Consultants, LLC. To learn more and sign up for the webinar, click ...
