Editors’ Note: This week, we’re pleased to welcome a guest blogger, Amy Barone from HealthCorps®. Read more to find out about HealthCorps’ mission to fight childhood obesity in high schools through their health curriculum.
At high schools around the country where HealthCorps has a presence, cafeteria lunches are getting a makeover. Lunch is getting tastier, more colorful and a whole lot healthier.
Credit for this work goes to HealthCorps’ passionate Health Coordinators, who teach and mentor full time in high schools, leading interactive classes and after school clubs in cooking and fitness, and taking curious teens on field trips to organic farms and healthy food shopping expeditions.
For healthy fun at lunch, HealthCorps Coordinators have introduced “Café O’ Yea” where they lead interactive discussions on sugar content in drinks, fat in fast food, and the benefits of whole grains, fruits and vegetables, dark chocolate, and laughter. Some Coordinators offer mini fitness competitions during Café O’ Yea and cheer on students who do the most pushups or crunches. The instructive sessions are typically held once a week and open to the entire student body.
HealthCorps® is a proactive health movement founded by heart surgeon and nationally syndicated talk show host Dr. Mehmet Oz, who found himself operating on younger and younger patients whose poor lifestyle choices, especially bad nutritional choices and inadequate exercise, were leading to chronic heart disease.
Dr. Oz’s foundation is fighting the obesity and mental resilience crises by getting American students and communities across the country to take charge of their health and help the country reach the tipping point towards wellness now and for the future of our children.
Like a Peace Corps for Health, HealthCorps’ national health educational/peer mentoring program is up and running in 50 high schools in nine states (AZ, CA, FL, MS, NJ, NY, OH, PA, TX) with future plans to implement the initiative in all 50 states in the next decade.
We’re challenging communities across the country to enhance their health and wellness through FitTown USA. Our community outreach connects and empowers citizens and organizations to bring about awareness and affect change through such community-based projects and initiatives as community gardens, playgrounds or safe routes to school. FitTown efforts are guided by key tools developed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention: the Community Health Index (CHI).
Through our advocacy efforts, HealthCorps is advocating for policy shifts that put health and physical education back into the core curriculum of the American education system and move us towards safer environments affecting health (food systems, transportation systems, public space design systems, nature) that encourage and enable people to be more physically active.
Both the HealthCorps Chairman Dr. Oz and HealthCorps President Michelle Bouchard have appeared before the United States Senate to discuss wellness policy ideas and HealthCorps’ mission and achievements.
And HealthCorps is making a difference. In December, we announced the promising results of a two-year study on our health mentoring program in New York City Schools conducted by Affinity Health Plan of the Bronx. Entitled, “Impact of a High School Mentoring Program on Diet and Physical Activity,” the study represents the first quantitative evaluation of HealthCorps whose programming will impact at least 25,000 teenagers and 50,000 community residents across nine states in the school year 2009-2010.
Tags: health, obesity, wellness
More about Amy and Scott Dawson, creators of Lunchtaker.com: One of our core focuses is on nutrition and fitness. Our children both attended a parent cooperative pre-school where the morning snack was as healthy as possible, and our family liked the opportunities for new foods that arose in pre-school. As our children go through grade school, we are focusing on continuing the trend of ensuring we feed ourselves a variety of foods, all good for our bodies... read more...
Posted Monday, February 1st, 2010 at 12:54 pm and filed under Education. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
