06/14/06 Getting Access to Healthy Foods

Getting Access to Healthy Foods. I'm Greg Martin with today's Line On Agriculture. Dr. Monica Dixon has a way of getting right to the cold hard bottom line when it comes to the health of Americans. DIXON: We are way too fat in America. In our state we are at approximately 67% the latest research obese or overweight. Those are numbers unheard of at least in our lifetimes, that level of weight. And there are some negative affects of that as many of you know, diabetes. And about 2 weeks ago there was some great research that came out that told us 25% of our children are now obese. Dixon with Empower Communications also heads up the Access to Healthy Foods Coalition. DIXON: What the effects of that are, are that they are going into their lives with a legacy of diabetes that we can't afford to pay for. They are going to carry that weight with them and by the way it's 85% of them will carry that weight into adulthood and so we are going to have to pay for the healthcare costs associated with that etc. The Access to Healthy Foods Coalition is a group of businesses, industries, government agencies and non-profit organizations working together to positively influence health and nutrition by improving the access to healthier foods. Dixon says they have developed a new way of looking at this problem. DIXON: Always in our lives it was the individual level. You need to eat healthier food. You need to cut your sodium, you need to cut your fat, etc., etc. Now research decided that was not working. We need to work at this level, the policy level, the environmental level. The level where people live, work, play. So in other words, many of you have gone out there, you try to lose weight, you try to make changes in your lifestyle, it doesn't work. According to Dixon the Coalition has been charged with making healthier foods easier to get to and limiting negative choices. DIXON: How are we going to address obesity? They came up with three ways to do it. The first one is to increase access to health promoting foods. In other words, every single place that people go, we want healthy foods available. But the problem is that only 16% of meals anymore are ever eaten in the household. The second part of the puzzle is hunger and food insecurity and then breast feeding. We want to increase the portion of people who breast feed. Those three things are the fastest ways that we could reduce obesity in this state. For more information log on to accesstohealthyfoods.org. That's today's Line On Agriculture. I'm Greg Martin on the Northwest Ag Information Network.