Engage Her: Activating Women and MultiCultural Communities

Today the U.S. Government announced that our country has more than 70 million or 26.7% of population’s adults are obese. It is considered to be a major public health threat by the U. S. Centers for Disease Control. Over 400,000 people were surveyed and the results and numbers are huge. In 9 states, over 30% of their population is considered obese. There is increasing concern and effort to address this situation as obesity is directly related to increased heart disease, stroke, Type 2 diabetes and certain types of cancers.

The survey also reported that multicultural communities were especially hard hit. African Americans were most likely to be obese with 36.8% of African American men and 41% of African American women were considered to be obese. Hispanics were reporting 30% obesity in their populations. With women providing most of the health care support, food preparation and education to our families, it is important that we begin to educate and change the way we eat and exercise within our families. Many multicultural families continue to prepare traditional cultural foods that use high fats, sodium, carbohydrates that can lead to increased obesity and related diseases. We need to explore utilizing substitute ingredients that are healthier and begin to address this obesity situation.

This further supports the work that First Lady Michelle Obama is undertaking with her national “Let’s Move” campaign aimed at seriously reducing Childhood Obesity in a generation. Let’s take a look at what our children, parents and families are eating and determine how we can begin to modify our eating and exercise habits in order to increase our families’ longevity and health.

Fast food is a term some take seriously, and some just don’t care about. To me, fast food is bad and I don’t see how people can sell it to other people: it can cause obesity, heart failure, and other serious illnesses.

Is it really hard to sell good, healthy food to the world? It’s not only the fast food restaurants but the grocery stores around you. If you live in an affluent area you have the best chances of having healthy and nutritious selections of foods in the stores. But if you live in a low income environment you’re likely to have limited selections and non-nutritious foods to choose from, which forces you to buy bad foods that can cause health problems.

I’m the type of person who craves fast food, candy and other bad foods. But in my house they’re hard to find. When my mom buys food, the meat is turkey, the noodles and bread are made with whole grains, and she buys water not soda. If this cycle were repeated in every person’s house, it would be a good start and there would be fewer obesity patients.

I know many people have so much fast food that they don’t eat anything else. All they crave is fast food if they try avoiding it. That’s a diet you have to work hard at changing if you’re overweight.

Even if you look healthy on the outside you still can be a victim of diabetes. So the best thing is to cut back on the fast food, sweets and pie! Everyone loves pie, but when it comes to your body you’re the only one who can really take care of it.

So when you walk to the store, please think twice about what you’re going to put through your body. Every wrong choice carries consequences.

Thank you for your time,
Tina Gerardo

FAST FOOD! That just calls every body’s name. Most teenagers love to eat fast food all the time. They don’t realize that it’s extremely bad for them, and that it’s killing them slowly. I think that we buy fast food because it’s really cheap and fast. A lot of times people don’t have time to make their own healthy food at home, so they decide to eat food at an unhealthy place.

Fast food effects our community because many people are now obese and that is definitely not healthy for us. Obese people are not just living an unhealthy life, but also a very sad one because they get teased all the time about their weight. When I see an obese person I feel very bad for them because sometimes they even have difficulty walking and that’s not good at all.

Even though we are provided with the nutrition facts of the fast food places, we still don’t take the time to look at them because sometimes we just don’t understand what it says on there and how much of everything we are supposed to be eating or what we are not supposed to be eating. Even if we order a salad at a fast food place I don’t think it’s healthy because of all the things that we could add to it – that’s what makes the food good. We don’t realize that they’re tricking us by saying that it’s a healthy salad when in reality it contains many things we don’t know about.

Fast food is just horrible to consume.

The dollar menu may sound like a good deal, but I doubt that people understand what fast food contains. It may be convenient to just pick up a burger meal at the nearest burger joint, but it doesn’t provide you the nutrients you need. Eating fast food can eventually lead to major causes to your health due to all the fats and unprocessed meat used to make the food. Fast foods contain so much sodium, fats, and not enough protein. I even notice that some fast food restaurants had a nutrition menu, but is was flipped around and used as a place mat. I mean, why would you make it unnoticeable? It makes it seem like they’re hiding the fact that they know the food is unhealthy. And if you haven’t noticed that low income communities also don’t have the best grocery stores and are unable to get their hands on fresh organic food. Personally, I think it’s unfair that only the wealthy communities are able to get healthy fresh organic foods, while our multicultural community are not. In other words, we’re eating trash. And if you ask any teens why they like fast food, their response is ‘it’s just so good’ but they don’t know that in a few years it can take their life and possibly lead to obesity.

I also find it wrong how meat is being cloned, and we aren’t being informed. Luckily, a law has recently made it possible for us to tell which ones are cloned and organic. But at the same time, cloned meat is unhealthy and can lead to cancer. I’m worried that one day organic meat will be too expensive and the cloned meat will be cheap. That would mean that our community would either eat cloned meat and be unhealthy or be vegetarians since we can’t afford real meat. It is very unfortunate that we aren’t able to get the healthiest foods, but we can fix that by eating home cooked meals that contain vegetables and all the nutrients we need without the excess unhealthy products. I want people to watch what they eat because it can lead to serious health problems and that can effect our communities a lot. I just hope that people will eat healthier and think about their future.

First Lady Michelle Obama recently announced a national initiative on Fighting Childhood Obesity. The statistics are startling: one out of 3 kids in the U.S. are either overweight or obese. The national trends indicates that our children are on track to becoming the first generation of children to be less healthy and live a shorter life span than their parents. It is a huge problem with significant implications and outcomes in the years ahead. The First Lady has taken on this initiative and has convened a number of cabinet level members, departments and resources to begin to put together a long term plan on how to solve this issue. As she says “this is eminently a solvable problem”. Their long term goal is to change the health status of this country’s children.

We will be tracking this health intitiative, participating and communicating on this critical issue that affects all of us. We will be reaching out to you for your ideas, suggestions and comments. Stay tuned.