What happens if you beef up bike paths, get rid of fried foods in school cafeterias, and offer twice-a-week salsa classes that cost just $10 for two months?
People lose weight.
That’s the result in Somerville, Ma., where a five-year-old program called “Shape Up Somerville,” initiated in collaboration with Tufts University, has focused on systemic changes to encourage healthy eating and physical activity.
Somerville’s efforts are described in recent article in the Boston Globe.
After just one school year in which kids were fed healthier lunches with low-fat dairy products, fewer servings of potatoes, and lots of fresh fruits and veggies, Tufts nutritionist Christina Economos (a member of the BodiMojo health advisory panel, by the way!) found that 8-year-olds weighed one pound less than those in a control group. May not seem like much, but Economos called it significant because, in Somerville, a whopping 44 percent of kids are overweight or at risk of being overweight.
The Globe article also describes how a 55-year-old City Hall worker lost 10 pounds by taking advantage of a $200 subsidy to join a gym and taking the $10 salsa class.
Somerville’s efforts suggest an important point: if you make it easier for people to eat healthy and exercise, they will do it.
At BodiMojo, this mirrors our thoughts exactly!
–Contributed by Karen Feldscher, A BodiMojo Mom
Shape Up as A Community | BodiMojo Teen Health Blog - Teenage Nutrition, Fitness, Stress, Relationships & More // Mar 28, 2011 at 6:08 pm
[...] Shape Up Somerville is a testament to the potential good that can be created when people come together with a shared purpose, a collaborative spirit, innovative thinking and a willingness to try new things. Somerville is a now considerably healthier city than it had once been. If more communities throughout the country could incorporate some of Somerville’s strategies, it’s certain that we’d see an improvement in the health and overall quality of life of not just our children and teens but also adults. [...]