American Medical Association cites Chicago group as model for fighting
obesity
Lindsey Tanner
Canadian Press
Tuesday, October 19, 2004
CHICAGO (AP) - Yoga and dance workshops for kids and parents at a museum.
Free bike locks to encourage students to cycle to school. A food bank that
offers fitness workouts along with hot meals for children.
These are among the projects encouraged by a two-year-old Chicago
consortium tackling childhood obesity.
"The obesity epidemic is one of the defining public health challenges of
the 21st century," said Dr. Matthew Longjohn, head of the Consortium to
Lower Obesity in Chicago Children. He believes the problem demands
unprecedented collaboration across all sectors of society, and that's what
has happened through the consortium.
The group was praised by the American Medical Association as it begins a
two-day obesity summit here Tuesday.
Housed at Children's Memorial Hospital, the consortium funds a variety of
obesity-fighting projects and research throughout the city. It's also an
information-sharing network that has amassed nearly 700 partners citywide,
including doctors, schools, museums, industry and charity groups that reach
tens of thousands of children.
Under the consortium's influence, these groups have added an
obesity-fighting focus to their programs.
The American Medical Association, which is working on an obesity agenda, is
taking a close look at the Chicago group's efforts. The medical
organization might recommend that doctors get involved in similar community
efforts, said Dr. Arthur Elster, the AMA's director of medicine and public
health.
"There are relatively few models as extensive as this one," Elster said
Fighting obesity "has to be much deeper than just a doctor and a patient,"
said AMA president Dr. John Nelson, citing dire projections: 400,000
Americans will die this year from obesity-related causes and in the next
few years, obesity will replace tobacco as the leading cause of preventable
death.
"We've got to have a cultural change," Nelson said. "We've got a real
uphill battle."
One of Chicago group's first projects was to define the problem locally in
a study last year showing that 23 per cent of kindergartners in city public
schools are obese - more than double the national average of 10.4 per cent
for similarly aged youngsters.
Another group's survey found obesity rates as high as 53 per cent among
Chicago children ages two to 12 in some black and Hispanic neighbourhoods.
"The numbers are startling, and it's growing worse every year," said Rob
Sadowsky of the Chicagoland Bicycle Federation who serves on the
consortium's executive committee.
The consortium is evaluating whether obesity can be reduced through
partners' programs, including the bike federation's free lock "libraries"
at public schools, which encourage cycling to school, and the bike group's
efforts to encourage parents in unsafe neighbourhoods to walk with groups
of children to school instead of driving or taking the bus.
The group also influenced the Greater Chicago Food Depository to add
fitness activities to its hot meals programs for low-income children.
Another partner, Chicago's Mexican Fine Arts Center Museum, enlisted the
consortium to help with a fitness festival earlier this year that drew more
than 10,000 predominantly Hispanic families, said Longjohn, who is
organizing a workshop to train Chicago schoolteachers in nutrition, obesity
and diabetes issues.
The Chicago Children's Museum recently held dance and yoga workshops
designed to get families more active, and its work with the consortium has
inspired plans for a permanent fitness-oriented exhibit expected to open by
2006, said the museum's Mark Saalfeld.
With about 500,000 visitors each year, the museum has seen plenty of
overweight children. Collaborating with the consortium, he said, "has
helped our thinking about what our role is in terms of the healthy
development of children."