The east side neighborhood of San Antonio struggles with socioeconomic hardships, health issues, and a lack of access to quality healthcare. In the past few years, the nonprofit Eastside Promise Neighborhood (EPN) has sought ways to improve conditions for residents in the city’s east side. To solve the gap in the availability of healthcare options in the area and fight health issues, the EPN partnered with a provider, CommuniCare Health Partners, to open a new health clinic in the area.
Health improvement needed in San Antonio
San Antonio’s historic east side neighborhood is home to 17,955 residents (mostly Latino), more than 200 private businesses, and six schools on 3.5 square miles bounded by Interstate 37 to the west, Fort Sam Houston to the north, AT&T Center Parkway ...
This is part of our Food and Latino Kids: A Research Review »
Introduction
While a nationwide concern, obesity is especially prevalent among Latino children. Nearly 40 percent of U.S. Latino youth ages 2-19 are overweight or obese compared with 28.5 percent of non-Latino white youths.1 Obesity is linked to increased risk of developing type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease, asthma, liver disease, and cancer.2 Given that Latinos are one of the fastest-growing U.S. populations, preventing and reducing obesity among Latinos will have an important impact on our nation’s health. Latino children are more likely to live in poverty than others,3,4 causing diet quality to suffer and increasing the risk for developing obesity.5 Limited neighborhood access to affordable, healthy ...
In November 2015, U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy visited John C. Fremont High School's Gardening Apprenticeship Program. The schools program encourages students to learn how to grow healthy foods and utilize the foods towards cooking healthy dishes. The program supports healthy initiatives in Latino inner city neighborhoods like Los Angeles (48.4% Latino) that are less likely to have access to fresh foods and are dealing with high rates of childhood obesity. Students involved in the 12-week after-school gardening apprenticeship program learn to grow food and cook healthy dishes. The students enjoy a 1.5-acre site that holds the students fresh vegetables like, potatoes, peas and beets. Many of the students enjoy trying the new foods and learning about new vegetables they had never ...
Decades of conflicting health, fitness, and weight-loss messages has lead to major confusion about what Latinos and all Americans need to do to be healthy. Every Body Walk! is clarifying health messages by redefining physical activity. "We could be raising the first generation in modern society to end up with statistically shorter life expectancies than their parents," said Mark Fenton, adjunct associate professor at Tufts University. "And it won't be because of some infectious disease. It will be the diseases of sedentary living, like diabetes."
Walking or Running
Which sounds more doable on a daily basis: walking or running? Walking! Regardless of fitness level or weight status, complex biological and molecular processes occur within our body when we walk, which ...
What if fast food meals for kids were considered more nutritious? Researchers from New York University (NYU) studied kids' meals by looking at over 358 fast food receipts which detailed over 400 purchases of kids' meals. After calculating what those meals would look like with a set of healthy nutritional standards, researchers summed up that there would have been a nine percent drop in calories for kids if the fast food meals purchased were up to their standards. This may not seem like much, but Dr. Brian Elbel, the lead author of the study and associate professor in the department of population health at NYU, said in a recent article, that these changes on fast food kids' meals would be a step in the right direction to help fight against childhood obesity. The new bill purposed ...
Of the approximately four million babies born in the United States every year, only about 14 percent are born in Baby-Friendly hospitals, The Baby-Friendly Hospital Initiative established 10 Steps to Successful Breastfeeding in 1989, which were endorsed by the American Academy of Pediatrics in 2009. However, a recent study found that many hospitals still do not implement these 10 Steps. Breastfeeding has numerous health benefits, including reduced childhood obesity, but many mothers face challenges to breastfeed. Maternal experiences during the birth hospitalization show that a hospital's policies and practices affect a mother's ability to establish and maintain breastfeeding. In the six-year study, Maternity Practices in Infant Nutrition and Care, investigators compare ...
A farmer's market is a lot of fun—for parents only, usually. Kids often just tag along, glumly, as their parents busily shop for fresh fruits and vegetables. That is, until the Market Sprouts Kids Club. Kaely Summers and other farmer's market managers in Oregon teamed up to create the Market Sprouts Kids Club program to teach local kids who come to the market about farming, fresh produce, and healthy eating. Now kids ages 5-12 who visit local markets, like Summers' Forest Grove Farmer's Market in Forest Grove, Ore., (23.1% Latino), do fun, interactive activities alongside farmers and volunteers who teach about healthier foods and healthier choices!
Farmer's Markets and Children in Oregon
Officials with Adelante Mujeres, a non-profit organization fin Forest Grove, have been ...
Hispanic children who participated in a unique weight-maintenance pilot intervention were more likely to adopt healthy lifestyles, resulting in healthier weights, than children who didn’t participate, according to a UT Health San Antonio study in the June 2015 issue of the journal Childhood Obesity. The pilot study, which paved the way for a new $2.9 million grant to test the intervention on a larger scale through 2019, was implemented with parent-child pairs in a rural clinic in New Braunfels, Texas. Children who participated were Hispanic, ages 5-14, and obese/overweight. “Comprehensive behavioral programs have been shown to help these children improve their weight status. However, more efficient interventions that can be done in primary care clinics must be developed for ...
More than 27,000 people across the nation recently wrote letters to urge Taco Bell to quit pushing sugary drinks and add healthier drink options, like low- or no-fat milk. The letters highlighted Taco Bell’s recent beverage rollout of sugar-filled drinks, like the favorite Manzanita Sol, and subsequent aggressive marketing of these drinks on social media. Letters were collected by Salud America!, an obesity research and communication network funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. Salud America! leaders delivered 27,748 letters to Taco Bell this week. We will post their response here in coming days. Why is this effort so important? Studies find that Latino kids already drink more sugary drinks each day than their white peers, and have higher rates of ...
