Growing up in Spain, Dr. Marta Katalenas ate home-cooked meals made with fresh ingredients.When she moved to the United States in 1984 to learn English and become a pediatrician, she saw a different way of life that included way more treats, especially sugary juices and drinks. As she began her practice, she said she saw a growing association between kids drinking too much sugar and being overweight. Dr. Katalenas decided that if she was going to help parents set their kids on a path of health, she needed to get the whole community involved in reducing sugary drink consumption—so she made reducing sugary drinks part of her new monthly health challenge for families.
EMERGENCE Awareness: Spain native Dr. Marta Katalenas, who moved to the U.S. in 1984 and became a board-certified ...
Latino kids drink above-average amount of sugary drinks (soda, sports/fruit drinks, flavored milk), contributing to higher obesity rates. What can be done? Join Salud America!, the Yale Rudd Center for Food Policy & Obesity, and the Center for Science in the Public Interest for a #GrowingHealthyChange Tweetchat, “Sugary Drinks & Latino Kids” at noon central (1 p.m. eastern) Tuesday, March 25, 2014. Growing Healthy Change is a website from Salud America! to empower healthy community changes—including less sugary drinks and more water—for Latino kids locally and across the nation. Follow the Tweetchat on Twitter (via @SaludToday, @YaleRuddCenter, and @CSPI) to ask questions, learn more about sugary drink initiatives, and share what sugary drink changes you’re ...
Across the nation, communities are educating families about making healthy beverage choices. In southern New York, Broome County is taking it one step further by working on a new sugary drinks policy for all the programs run by the Broome County Cooperative Extension. The policy will provide guidelines for drink options at their programs and in their vending machines. Local 4-H groups will also adopt the policy. They plan on water and unsweetened milk replacing high-sugar sodas, juices, and teas. The extension hopes to bring these healthy drink policies to local schools and other organizations as well. Watch a news segment about the efforts ...
In a collaborative effort First 5 Contra Costa and Healthy and Active Before 5 created an ad campaign that depicts soda and other sugar-sweetened beverages with sharp, scary teeth. Sugar Bites is a social marketing campaign that aims to encourage parents to provide their children with healthier beverages. The ads are featured in both English and Spanish, in order to reach as many people as possible in the 24.8% Hispanic area. Advertisements like these can help educate people and use the same tactics large corporations use to advertise unhealthy drinks and snacks. “In 2010, one in three low-income kids in Contra Costa County ages 2-5 were overweight or obese,” said Tracy Irwin, public affairs manager at First 5. “Childhood obesity is a public health crisis. It not ...
Want to get better water access at your school but don't know where to start? The Water Works Implementation Guide can help you develop a comprehensive program to increase access to safe, appealing, low-cost drinking water sources in your school. It also provides ideas, materials, and resources to help you increase water consumption among the school community. Finally, the guide provides resources to help you evaluate the impact of your water program. The guide can be found at waterinschools.org, which also houses fact sheets and case studies about schools that have brought water back on to campus. Development of this guide was supported by a grant from the San Francisco Foundation and from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation through its Healthy Eating Research program. Check ...
Health advocates in California are busy. Between San Francisco's soda tax bill and the proposed warning labels on sugary drinks, momentum is growing for healthy changes in the state, many of which would affect Latino families. In January, the Sonoma County Department of Health Services kicked off an ad campaign urging people to reconsider their beverage choices. Billboards throughout the county are spotlighting the issue. From January through April 2014, residents will see ads depicting the sugar content in sodas and energy and sports drinks on billboards, YouTube and Facebook, in convenience stores, schools, and throughout the community. The website, www.ChooseHealthyDrinks.org, will provide more information on how much sugar is in common drinks, how to read nutrition labels, ...
Cutler-Orosi is the largest unincorporated community in one of the poorest counties in California. Located in the largely Latino region called the San Joaquin Valley, more than half of the men and women who live here are migrant farm workers. Poverty limits food and beverage choices to what’s cheap, easy, and not always healthy. One school district food services director, Brenda Handy, went above and beyond to ensure that, while kids were at school, they were not only eating well, but drinking well, too.
Tackling the 'Soda Issue'
Ever since Brenda Handy started as food services director for the 95% Latino Cutler-Orosi Joint Unified School District in California’s San Joaquin Valley more than four years ago, she saw students struggle to maintain healthy weights. She noticed ...
Sugary drinks are a large component of added calories in the American diet. Latino kids have increased their consumption of sugary drinks—such as soft drinks, sports drinks, fruit-flavored drinks, and flavored milk—between 1991 and 2008, research shows. In Contra Costa, Calif., where 24% of the population is Latino, one of every three kids from low-income families are overweight or obese. A county organization worked with an advertising agency to develop a bilingual social marketing campaign, called Sugar Bites, to urge parents to choose water for their kids instead of sugary drinks.
EMERGENCE
Awareness: First 5 California is a state organization funded by Proposition 10, a statewide ballot initiative passed in 1998, to conduct health and education programs to benefit children ages ...
One sugary drink a day for a year is equal to 7,300 sugar cubes—the length of four blue whales—according to a new online campaign to promote more water and fewer sugary drinks from the Alliance for a Healthier Generation and Brita USA. Sugar-sweetened beverages are the largest source of added sugar in the diets of US youth. Parents, caregivers, and role models for the next generation can set the right example and relay the right message about sugar consumption to kids, according to the Alliance for a Healthier Generation blog post. "It’s easy to overlook the amount of sugar we consume in a single day when we look at it as just flavor. Remove that sugar from the drink and give it a physical form, and it turns into something that we would not as quickly put into our bodies. ...
