Students across the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD), participated in the Healthy Schools Campaign healthy cooking contests. Students were challenged to create a nutritious lunch that includes fresh fruit and vegetables, meets USDA nutrition guidelines, be under 760 calories and costs less than $1.70. The challenge allows students to win a chance to represent Los Angeles across the state and serve the model meal in an all-expenses paid Cooking up Change competition in the capitol. The winner could go on from there to serve the meal to congress and become a model meal for schools across the country. Having healthy options and creative ways to get kids involved in creating healthy meals is a innovative way to change school food environments. Studies show that when ...
High Schools in St. Joseph, Missouri are now able to help students make the healthier choice the easier choice with the school's new water bottle stations. To help encourage students to chose water over sugary beverages, local health departments helped purchase the new water bottle filling fountains for various local schools and put up sugar shocker signs to help students know how much sugar is in various sugary beverages. The grant came through the Missouri Department of Health and Senior Services and then the new fountains were purchased by the City of St. Joseph Health Department to help encourage students to drink more water. Quick-fill water bottle stations that transform regular water fountains into bottle filling stations were put into various local schools including ...
A new campaign from the Children's Hospital of Los Angeles is working to help the communities of Santa Monica, CA (14.1 % Latino) increase consumption of water and learn why it's important to drink water instead of sugary beverages. The campaign, called "Water: The Healthiest Choice" is hoping to help parents' increase their knowledge of the health benefits of drinking water instead of sugary beverages, especially for their children's health. Research has shown that sugary beverages, when consumed daily, increase the risk of diet-related disease in kids and adults. Latino kids often consume many sugary beverages, and with each sugary drink consumed the risk of becoming an obese adult jumps to sixty percent. The campaign suggests some ways to help parents to help kids drink more ...
Drinking water is a vital component to staying healthy, and now a new study from JAMA Pediatrics shows how students in New York who had more restrictive beverage option at school and access to clean and cold water, also came to have healthier weights. But recent news stories have shown that not all schools water is safe. Schools need to make sure water is safe through lead tests and having safe water accessible for all students, and visitors, especially since water may help students weight, finds the new study. The study looked at more than 1 million students across New York schools after a new rule banned sodas and high sugar and calorie drinks, but replaced vending machines with new water jets. The students were given cups to use in conjunction with the water jets, and ...
A study from Preventing Chronic Disease showed that after districtwide policies were implemented across Boston schools, students had less access to sugar-sweetened beverages. The data showed that after a ban of sugar-sweetened beverages in 2004, 89.6% of all schools studied met beverage nutrition standards, with elementary schools showing the most compliance at 93.6 percent. Through the study, researchers also found that when these nutrition standards were met at 85.5 percent of schools studied, only four percent of students had little to no access to competitive beverages or sugary beverages at school. Rebecca S. Mozaffarian, MS, MPH of the department of social and behavioral sciences at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health explained in a recent article that these ...
Gaby Medina, a mom and health educator in the neighborhood of Westwood, in Denver, Colo. (79.36%), didn’t have a lot of faith in the safety of local tap water when she arrived here from Mexico. Much of Denver's foreign-born population similarly distrust the safety of tap water. However, Gaby eventually learned to trust the water. She then took a big step to make sure her family, friends, and fellow Latino residents across the community understand that tap water is far safer, healthier, and more affordable than sugary drinks.
Is tap water safe? Gabriela “Gaby” Medina is your average Latina mom who wants to help her 10-year-old daughter and her family live happy, healthy lives. In Mexico, tap water is not always safe to drink. “Initially, yes, I was hesitant ...
Many states across the nation are working towards healthier beverage and health policies locally, but in moving towards healthier policies there are many topics and ideas that need to be evaluated. ChangeLab Solutions and Healthy Food America has created a space for best practices towards creating or developing tax legislation that will be effective and workable for different communities. Current resources include information that includes best practice recommendations for: understanding what type of tax to employ
defining beverages subject to the tax
defining the tax base
tax rate
exemptions for small businesses
earmarking tax proceeds To read in full about the resources offered by Healthy Food America and ChangeLab, click ...
A new study revealed that a natural sugar called trehalose helped prevent nonalcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD)in mice. Dr. Brian DeBosch, MD, Ph.D., a pediatric gastroenterologist found that Trehalose, a natural sugar found in plants and insects, may help combat the toxic levels of fat that can build up in the liver. Mice in the study also lost fat, and had lower cholesterol, fatty acids, and triglycerides, but Dr. Debosch warns that there is still research needing to be done to address whether the mice lost bone or muscle mass as well. Dr. Debosch encourages his patients to always avoid foods like sugar-sweetened beverages that have added fructose as consumption of sugars, especially fructose found in junk food and sodas, can lead to fatty liver disease, diabetes, high ...
Many restaurants offer the same sugary beverages on kids meals with unhealthy options like high-sugar sodas, lemonades and juices. Now Maryland lawmakers are considering a bill to help ban soda's and other sugary drinks from kids menu's in all restaurants. Wanting to help parents and kids make the healthy choice the easy choice, the bill would change kids menus to offer healthier choices like water, low-fat milk or 100 percent juices at regular price. "The choice that comes with 80 percent of restaurant kids' meals is a soda or a fruit punch, and in those cases families are always welcomed to ask for a healthy drink, but it sometimes costs $2 or $3 more to get a milk," Robi Rawl, the Sugar Free Kids Maryland Executive Director said in a recent article. According to the Center ...
