On Spanish-language TV, food and beverage advertising is out of whack. Just 1% of food ads show water, fruits, or veggies, and 70% of ads show fast-food or other restaurants, candy, gum, snacks, and sugary drinks, according to a study by the UConn Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity, Salud America!, and others. Those are discouraging numbers...but there’s good news! The Children’s Food and Beverage Advertising Initiative (CFBAI) is a voluntary self-regulation program for food and drink companies to create healthier advertising to kids under age 12. Who’s in? McDonald’s, Burger King, General Mills, PepsiCo, Kraft, Kellogg’s, Hershey, Mars, Nestle, Campbell Soup and more. We’d like to thank them for getting involved when it comes to healthier advertising to ...
In a Florida school district that didn’t provide health classes in high schools, a health educator, Risa Berrin, and her sister, Valerie Berrin, worked together to raise the bar on health education with their Health Information Project (HIP). HIP is a peer-to-peer program that allows students to teach each other about health problems, prevention, and how to access to local health resources toward reducing obesity and other issues.
The Need for Health Education in Schools
Awareness: Risa Berrin was a health reporter for her college newspaper when she first started seeing how teens were unaware or misinformed about health and prevention. She became part of the solution, starting a career as a certified human growth and reproductive health educator. While teaching law classes at ...
The Los Angeles County Department of Public Health partnered with AltaMed Services and Superior Grocers to help Maywood residents (97.4% Latino) shop for healthy foods. AltaMed provides health care services to underserved populations in Southern California. Obesity rates in Maywood, CA are 30% for adults and almost 28% for children, and the Medicare population with diabetes is 31.99% compared to 26.64% in California. Parents may struggle to navigate supermarkets due to flashy packaging and clever marketing by the food industry, which spends $2 billion annually on kids alone. Additional challenges are due to ambiguous health claims, confusing nutrition labels and cost. 28.3% of Maywood residents live under the federal poverty level compared to 15.9% in California. Superior ...
To inform and educate the San Antonio community on just how much sugar is in the beverages people consume daily, health officials and community leaders partnered to launch the bilingual Sugar-Packed marketing campaign. After San Antonio’s previous attempts to tackle sugary drink consumption fizzled out, Nelson Wolff, judge of Bexar County, which includes San Antonio, and his partners reignited a campaign against sugar with hopes to change the way residents look at sugar in beverages and its effect on health. The campaign includes print and online materials, including a sugar calculator tool, educational brochures, and posters.
The Issue of Sugary Drinks and Health
Awareness: In 1997, Bexar County’s Health Collaborative formed as a coalition of health agencies that aim to ...
Youth and local leaders joined forces to launch Open Truth, a counter-advertising campaign that exposes big soda companies’ marketing tactics. The result was a series of poems and videos created by youth, as well as dozens of ads viewed by millions, a website, and a viral social media campaign aimed at getting those targeted by soda companies to speak out against Big Soda.
The Problem of Sugary Drinks and Obesity Awareness: By 2008, Christina Goette of the San Francisco Public Health Department and Shape Up San Francisco (Shape Up SF), a coalition of community groups and leaders interested in preventing chronic disease and promoting better health for the region, were already very concerned about the rise in type 2 diabetes. They weren’t the only ones concerned. With ...
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 ...
The zoo isn’t exactly a place of health (for humans), with typical fare like popcorn, ice cream, cotton candy, and sugary drinks. However, in El Paso, Texas, kids and visitors of all ages are learning fun facts about how they can be healthy by copying habits, like eating fruits and vegetables, from animals. In 2012, the El Paso Zoo installed new signs and healthy menu items to promote good health for its record-breaking 354,130 visitors, and they continue to work with city public health officials to make a healthy lifestyle second nature to the community.
How Healthy Is the Food at Your Zoo?
Awareness: In 2010, El Paso, Texas, a vibrant a city with a rich culture at the west-most point of the state, was named the “third-fattest city” in the U.S. Sue Beatty, a health ...
From PowerPoint presentations to outlines to thick textbooks, there are many ways students learn about the world while at school. Rarely do they get the chance to learn by actually solving real-world problems—let alone problems that directly affect their lives. Learn how Rick Treviño, a high school teacher in San Antonio, Texas, merged academics with activism and rallied his students to bring healthy, affordable fruits and vegetables into their neighborhood.
The Lack of Healthy Food in the Community
Awareness: While listening to the radio one day, San Antonio resident and high school teacher Rick Treviño got an idea. He was listening to a news story about how a group in Michigan started a Double Up Food Bucks program at local farmers’ market as a way to allow low-income ...
In a part of Kansas that struggled with obesity, one coalition stepped up to find new ways to help the local community make healthier food choices. How’d they try to do it? They started to change the local food environment by increasing the availability and marketing of healthy foods in local stores—and it worked.
The Need for Healthy Community Food
Awareness: Wyandotte County, Kan., which is 27.1% Hispanic and is home to Kansas City, had a growing problem of obesity, with 41% of school children listed as overweight or obese. Officials with the Latino Health for All Coalition were increasingly aware that many residents shop at corner stores or small grocery stores, which do not always offer fresh produce or a variety of healthy options. Rather, junk food and drinks are the ...
