INSTANT RECESS, FAITH, AND FITNESS

WELLNESS WEDNESDAYS 

“No matter how great your idea is, you’re just a lone nut until someone follows you and transforms you into a leader.  Thanks from the bottom of my heart for following me to start the real momentum behind Instant Recess.  Now if every one of us shares this idea with others, we’ll have a real MOVEment on our hands!  That’s my wish for the New Year – that Instant Recess becomes an unstoppable MOVEment helping us to turn around the obesity trends in this country.” 

(from an email sent by Dr. Yancey to colleagues at the beginning of 2013)

                                     Toni Yancey, MD, MPH

                                      1957-2013                                                                                     

                                                                                            

Believing that you are on the right track is important, no matter what your goal.  Solving America’s obesity epidemic will be done by setting goals and finding the right track to achieve them.  Have faith that achieving your fitness goal or goals is important for parents.  

How do you get to a healthy weight?  One way is to eat less of the bad foods and more of the good foods.  Another way is to eat smaller portions and to not skip meals and snacks.  You can eat less and exercise more.  To STAY at a healthy weight, however, requires increasing the amount of regular exercise you get.  Without the exercise, most people who lose weight tend to gain it back. This has been verified over and over again in the key habits of successful losers, a national database of people who have lost weight and kept it off for more than a year.

I strongly believe that as parents, we must be good role models for children.   Especially when it comes to fitness.  The funny thing is, when we have a Growing Healthy Kids education project and we talk about what the physical activity recommendations are (60 minutes a day for kids, 150 minutes a week for adults), the kids always ask why the recommendation for adults is less than half what it is for kids.  Great question.  Maybe we would be healthier as a country if adults set the bar higher for their own fitness goals.

Did you know that a minimum of 10 minutes of exercise gives you cardiovascular benefits?  A lot of people I talk with say, “I don’t have any time to exercise.”  What we teach parents is to break your 30 minutes a day recommendation into either three 10 minute or two 15 minute exercise period.  Finding 10 minutes to take a walk then becomes an easy goal to set and keep.

The fact is that most Americans are getting far less exercise than our bodies require to work right.  Many diseases, such as type 2 diabetes and high blood pressure, can be prevented by staying at a healthy weight.  Dr. Toni Yancey has been working in the field of public health to educate churches and communities that fitness is essential to the prevention of obesity-related diseases.  She was a nonsmoker who died April 23 at the young age of 55 from a year long battle with lung cancer.  Dr. Yancey believed in short bouts of exercise, just 10 minutes, and she created a MOVEment called Instant Recess because isn't recess the best part of school that everyone looks forward to?  

Dr. Toni Yancey, creator of "Instant Recess"

The Growing Healthy Kids movement to reverse, halt, and prevent childhood obesity pays its respect to Toni Yancey.  We have lost a leader who fought to protect public health.  Her MOVEment and her message lives on.  To learn more about Instant Recess, click here.  

Now, I'm off for 10 minutes of Instant Recess.  On with the walking shoes and that's me out the door!

In gratitude,

Nancy Heinrich, MPH

Growing Healthy Kids, Inc.

SUGAR - BY THE NUMBERS

WELLNESS WEDNESDAYS

“To improve health outcomes, we must get better at improving health literacy.” 

                                      --Nat Irvin II, DMA, M.A.

                                                                 Professor of Management

                                                                  University of Louisville, College of Business

Professor Irvin was making his final remarks at last month’s Health Equity Summit held at the Muhammad Ali Center in Louisville, Kentucky.  The meeting was about bridging the gaps in the health of residents of Louisville, but his message applies to every city in this country. 

Improving health literacy is central to the mission and education projects of the Growing Healthy Kids movement.  Which is why we had a very important date with 40 elementary age children recently to talk about ketchup.

Hold on there.  Did you say ketchup?  Yes, ketchup.  The kids went nuts when they walked into the art room at the Boys and Girls Club in Sebastian, Florida and saw a bottle of Hunt’s “No Preservatives” tomato ketchup on the front table.  I heard kids say, “I love that stuff!”  and “Can I have some?”  An American staple, right?  Ketchup is made from tomatoes, but what parents often don’t know, or take the time to notice, is that it also contains added sugars and added salt.  

Teaching kids about sugar at the Boys and Girls Club (see the bottle of ketchup?)

As the kids learned, a serving size for ketchup is 1 tablespoon.  Next time you use ketchup, measure out 1 tablespoon and see how little that really is.  Then ask yourself, "Will I have one serving or will I be having 3 or 4 or 5?"  When I occasionally use ketchup at home, like when I make oven-baked sweet potato fries, I have more than 1 tablespoon.   But I don’t eat it every day or every week.  All the kids who eat chicken McNuggets every day are getting lots of hidden, added calories from the added sugars in the ketchup they are piling on the McNuggets.  That’s where we are getting into trouble with extra calories and extra weight.

How do you teach kids, or parents for that matter, that sugar is what we call the “evil empire” ingredient?  A little bit is OK for most people but it is easy to eat too much of it.

Let’s look at sugar by the numbers.  15-4-0-0-0-0-75 

One teaspoon of the white stuff has 15 calories.  

One teaspoon has 4 grams of carbohydrates.  

One teaspoon has no protein.  

One teaspoon has no vitamins.  

One teaspoon has no minerals.  

One teaspoon has no nutritional value.  

One teaspoon of sugar contains calories but no nutritional value.  

There are more than 75 names for sugar.  

The fact is that eating too much sugar leads to obesity, depression, diabetes, acne, tooth decay, inflammation, and other health issues.

A 12-ounce can of soda has around 44 grams of sugar.  That equals 11 teaspoons of sugar.   That’s 165 calories with no nutritional value.  What Growing Healthy Kids is asking parents to do is to start looking at the sugar content of the foods you are buying for your kids (and you).  Choose foods with less sugar, not more.  Drink water, not soda.  

A special thank you to Ella Chabot, Art Director at the Sebastian Boys and Girls Club, and Jordan Adams, Branch Director, for inviting Growing Healthy Kids to teach the children you serve.

In gratitude,

Nancy Heinrich, MPH

Founder, Growing Healthy Kids

3 TIPS TO KEEP YOUR KIDS HEALTHY

WELLNESS WEDNESDAY

“If we cut our skin or break a bone, we take it for granted that the body will heal.  But we can also heal from heart disease, weight problems, and diabetes-yet that will never happen if we do not get away from the foods that are causing the problem and take advantage of foods that heal.”  
                                               -- Neal Barnard, MD                                                                             

Later today I will be giving a talk which I hope will be the first of many talks in my education campaign for parents (for details about today's talk, go to the end of this column).  If we don’t start eating less of the foods that cause disease, as Dr. Barnard suggests, and start eating more of the foods that promote health, then our nationala childhood obesity epidemic will continue to take a great toll.  When kids are diagnosed with obesity, their risk for obesity-related diseases usually diagnosed in older adults will fuel new epidemics of type 2 diabetes, heart disease, sleep disorders, joint problems, and more in younger and younger folks. 

We Americans love to have freedom of choice.  We want to have choices about what we can eat, what doctor we see, and what school our children can attend.  The problem is that we have so many choices, we are killing ourselves with the wrong foods.  So, back to my talk called, “How to Feed Your Kids for LIFE-tips for eating more of the good and less of the bad”.  One food that is causing the problems mentioned by Dr. Barnard is refined sugar, which is why you can be sure that we will be talking about sugar and its impact on kids.  

Did you know there are more than 75 different names for sugar?  The fact is that sugar has no vitamins, no minerals, no protein, no enzymes, and no nutritional value.  It does contain calories.  Sugar is a carbohydrate (the BAD kind) and we are eating way too much of it.  Sugar will kill you, not heal you.  The added sugars in the processed foods we love to choose to eat are making us fat and causing us to develop diabetes, depression, joint diseases, hypoglycemia, and more. 

Serve fresh fruit for a delicious dessert!

Here are 3 simple tips to get you started keeping your kids healthy: 

TIP 1:  If you are a parent and want to put your family on the path for a lifetime of better health free of disease, then start reading food labels to identify how much sugar is in a serving.  

TIP 2 :  Compare labels and choose the food with the lowest amount of sugar. 

TIP 3:  Start reading the ingredients for sugars, starting by learning to spot any ingredients that end in “–ose” and “–tol”.  

Use your parent power and be a role model for eating more of the good foods – and less of the bad.  Let your kids see you reading food labels while you are shopping for foods.  Exercise that great American freedom of choice and choose health!  

 

School will soon be out and if you and your kids are ready to “play in the dirt” as we like to do in the garden-based Growing Healthy Kids movement, then you’ve got to check out what the Man in Overalls (and cofounder of the Tallahassee Food Network) is doing in Tallahassee, Florida.  Click here.

Next, if you are concerned about what your kids are (or are not) eating at school, or if you have joined your son or daughter for lunch in their school cafeteria and you didn’t like what you saw, then get educated by learning more about the farm to school efforts.  The more you know, the more you will be able to be a voice for improving access to locally grown foods at school.  Lots of good info for parents when you click here:

Life is about enjoying good food, so here is an easy, fast, and inexpensive recipe for all us working parents.  Enjoy making this delicious main dish for a fun, healthy dinner.  Let the kids help with chopping and slicing the greens!

Fast Pasta and Greens

Serves 4-6.

Ingredients:

1. One 10-ounce package whole grain pasta (Growing Healthy Kids’ Seal of Approval goes to the Dreamfields brand)
2. One 16-ounce jar pasta sauce (our favorite:  whatever’s on sale) 
3. 1 large bunch kale, roughly chopped, stems removed
4. 1 zucchini, sliced
5. 1-3/4 cups sliced mushrooms

Directions:

Heat a pot of water to boiling.  Add pasta to the water and set a timer for 3 minutes less than the pasta cooking directions recommend.  While the pasta is cooking, heat the pasta sauce in a covered saucepan over medium heat until it just begins to bubble.  Reduce heat to low and simmer gently until ready to use. When the timer goes off, add the kale to the water and cook about 3 more minutes until the kale is tender. 

While everything is cooking, put the zucchini in a nonstick skillet over medium heat and dry fry until just brown, then flip the slices over and brown the other side.  Push the zucchini to the side, then add the mushrooms and stir-fry until soft.  Remove from heat.  When pasta and greens are cooked, drain them and put in a large casserole dish.  Add the hot pasta sauce and stir.  Put mushrooms and zucchini on top and serve. 

Check out the boxes of Dreamfields pasta from a recent Growing Healthy Kids program
at Vero Beach Elementary School.  The kids loved the recipe and the pasta!!

Recipe is from Fork Over Knives: The How-To Companion to the Feature Documentary Forks Over Knives, 2011.

Details:  Today's talk will be at the Vero Beach Main Library on 21st Street, 2nd floor, 3:45 PM sharp! And yes, you will learn a lot of practical tips about how to eat less sugar. 

In gratitude,
Nancy Heinrich, MPH
Growing Healthy Kids, Inc.