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Jump to: Being Active in the Community
Eating well in your community….
In many communities, healthy food can be difficult to find, while unhealthy food is readily available in fast food restaurants, corner markets and vending machines. In fact, more than 23.5 million Americans live in neighborhoods without easy access to healthy foods, and low-income communities are most harshly impacted.
The lack of healthy food in our communities is making us sick. Without easy access to healthy foods people are left with high calorie, low nutrient foods to feed their families.
This imbalance can be changed. When healthy food is readily available, families eat better. Around the United States people are making communities healthier by making it easier for everyone to get healthy foods. Some are working on policies to ensure zoning laws encourage more supermarkets in neighborhoods where they’re needed; others are collaborating with convenience stores and drug stores to add fresh produce to their inventory; while others are bringing farmers markets into communities where fresh fruits and vegetables are hard to come by.
Also, everywhere we go, drinks loaded with added sugar are available to us and our children – in vending machines, at corner markets and at fast food restaurants – often at a much lower cost than the few healthier options that may be offered. These sugary drinks include more than just soda, they’re also sports drinks, sugar-sweetened juice, energy drinks and flavored milks.
Sugary drinks are often the default option where we live, work and play, and we are seeing their impact. Sugary drinks are the largest source of added sugar in the American diet and the source of nearly one-sixth of a teenager’s calories. The consumption of sugary drinks has been linked to obesity and a number of health conditions such as heart disease, tooth decay and diabetes – drinking one to two sugary drinks a day increases the risk of diabetes by 26%.
We’re seeing healthy change in communities across the country where they’re having soda machines removed from schools, working with retailers to offer a wide variety of healthy beverage options, and working to remove sugary drinks from city buildings.
Being active in your community….
Marshfield Healthy Lifestyles Apple Path Program
Many communities lack accessible buildings, sidewalks, bike paths or parks, preventing the people who live there from being active. Children don’t have many places to play, bike or run - only 50% of young people report having access to parks, playgrounds, community centers and sidewalks. And adults don’t have access to bike paths, sidewalks for walking to work, or parks for playing sports.
Without places to be active, people are leading more sedentary lives, which contributes significantly to obesity. Today one in three adults is obese and one in three young people is overweight or obese.
It’s unfair that people living in low income neighborhoods have significantly less access to safe places to walk, bike or play. Children without these types of amenities are 20-45% more likely to be overweight or obese.
Communities across the country are working together to expand opportunities for active living, such as including bike lanes in transportation plans, fixing up parks, creating safer routes for children to get to school by walking or biking, or providing afterhours access to school fields and gymnasiums for the community to enjoy.
Wood County is addressing the obesity issue by working with communities; by partnering with restaurants to label lower calorie, more nutritious menu selections, by increasing healthy snacks, physical activity and limits on TV viewing in childcare centers and afterschool programs, by encouraging residents to grow a garden at schools, churches or in your neighborhood, by partnering with health care providers to improve access to healthy food to their patients, guests and staff, and by increasing access to affordable, safe places for physical activity.
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