Melanie's Corner

Earlier last year, the Australian government started an initiative to promote healthy choices. The goal is for individuals to make “healthier lifestyle choices to reduce their risk of heart disease, type 2 diabetes and some cancers.” It’s called Swap It, Don’t Stop It.

It reminds me a little of the USDA’s newest MyPlate message, “enjoy your food, but eat less.” You don’t have to completely give up the things you love. It’s when those things become habits that we start to worry. This program encourages individuals to gradually swap those bad habits with healthy alternatives.

They’ve created an extremely thorough 12 week plan available for anyone to use. They’ve also gone as far to create resources for health professionals to utilize with their patients.

The first part of the plan allows you to establish a start date as well as short and long term goals for yourself.  You are encouraged to create a list of your current eating habits and what you plan to try to swap it out with.

I like the idea of swapping, because it seems more attainable. They don’t ask you to give anything up completely. You’re simply encouraged to make small changes that can create big results. The 12 week plan includes a weekly activity planner and a meal diary to keep track of your eating habits for the week. It also contains a shopping list for every week categorized by the various food groups. Each category has great suggestions for items to swapping. The choices are endless. And in the unlikely case you run out of swapping ideas, they have an unlimited supply of recommendations from others users on their website.  (I told you it was thorough!)

The last weekly item is a healthy checklist. This is a series of questions to evaluate your week. The number of questions you answer yes to will determine your score. This is a great weekly item, because you can track your progress based on these numbers each week of the plan.

This YouTube video they used to kick off their campaign explains the program quite well.

The 12 week plan is available as a printable PDF, an iPad app, or you can track everything on Swap It’s online version of the plan.

So what do you say? Is this something we should start trending in the US?

The Strong4Life campaign has received attention lately for their controversial campaign asking their audience in Georgia to “stop sugarcoating” the youth obesity problem. The ads feature young people talking about how they feel about their size. Proponents claim that this is the wakeup call needed to get parents and the  community to recognize that this is a problem that requires attention. Others oppose the ads because they seem to blame and/or exploit the victim.

The ads have certainly raised the issue. Statistics from the CDC (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) indicate that youth obesity is a problem…

• Childhood obesity has more than tripled in the past 30 years.
• In 2008, more than one third of children and adolescents were overweight or obese.

The question to consider is whether this is an approach to solve the health problem of today’s youth. The campaign maintains a Facebook page where they offer helpful tips for maintaining a healthy life. I was happy to see that support. Checking out the Facebook page I noticed a comment from a fan that caught my eye…

Remove the shaming billboard campaign and lead with an inclusive campaign that gets all children excited about exercise and eating well.

Be for healthy children of all sizes, not against fat children.

That was a sentiment that struck me – especially at a time when obesity isn’t the only problem we see with youth. We see teens going the opposite direction and choosing not to eat enough food. We see fad diets. We see children who don’t know how to eat well – because they aren’t learning at home or school. Part of the issue is that parents may have never learned about nutrition at home or school either. Now is the time to get children (and families) excited about exercise and eating well.

We strive to spur that excitement through our educational nutrition products and support of broad campaigns such as MyPlate, programs such as LANA, which speak to the youngest children and deep rooted programs such as FACS (Family and Consumer Science) programming in schools, which helps create healthy children who become healthy parents (and teachers and doctors and policymakers). That is a recipe that we think will help inspire today’s youth to make healthy choices for themselves and give them the tools to support healthy children in the future.

In the past thirty years, studies from the Centers for Disease Control show that youth obesity has more than tripled. This is a shocking fact, and organizations like the Alliance for a Healthier Generation are pulling together to combat it.

In this video from Health Matters at Work podcast series, Jerry Franz of Community Health Charities interviews 18 year old, Scotie Conner from Oklahoma. Scotie is a youth advocate for the Alliance for a Healthier Generation, an organization started by the Clinton Foundation and American Heart Association. He strives to inspire other children to make small changes like exercising more and cutting out junk food to improve their health.

I will keep this post brief, because this video does a great job of explaining what it is he does and why he feels so strongly about it. It’s a very inspiring clip, and I encourage you all to take a few minutes to watch.

To know that this young individual is so passionate about creating change empowers others to do the same.