Why America is Obese

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The Choices We Make are Driven by the Choices We Have.

If you are surrounded by cheap unhealthy food options and few or no healthy options, you are likely to eat junk foods. If you have few sidewalks, unsafe streets, or nowhere to walk to, you are likely going to walk less. In order to effectively address the American obesity epidemic, we need to address the root causes by ensuring Americans have greater access to healthy foods and opportunities to live active lifestyles. We need to ensure Americans have more healthy choices than unhealthy choices, and we need to ensure that the healthy choices are accessible, affordable, and appealing.

It's no big surprise to anyone that there are a lot of overweight and obese Americans. The media seems to be constantly discussing America's battle with the bulge in newspapers, magazines, TV news, the radio, and the internet. In the newspaper industry, there is the old saying: "If it bleeds, it leads." Today, obesity is as hot of a story as it gets and has been more successful at keeping the public's interest than even Britney Spears' tragic life.

Despite all the talk about obesity, there is little press that confronts the real complexity of the issue.
With over 66% of American adults and children either overweight or obese, the problem has reached epidemic proportions and cannot be simply explained by saying individuals are making bad decisions. On one hand, the media talks about how obesity has become a national epidemic (a population-wide issue), yet on the other hand, the media tends to focus on individual-level interventions such as weight loss competitions like the Biggest Loser. The media almost completely ignores the need for broader community-wide interventions, for example increasing access to healthy foods or promoting active lifestyles by designing walkable/bikeable cities.

In the majority of states, schools are not even required to provide a baseline of Physical Education for children. Here in Missouri, elementary school kids are only required to get 50 minutes of PE per week, which averages out to 10 minutes/day. And if you take a tour through the school cafeteria, you'll be hard pressed to find anything that you recognize as food, let alone healthy food. Talking about root causes, how can we ever expect children to grow into healthy adults if we are teaching them such poor dietary and physical activity habits when they are so young?

Recent research is showing that the most successful interventions to combat the obesity epidemic are multi-faceted, community-wide interventions.
The issue is much more complicated than individuals making bad choices, and therefore, the interventions need to address the true complexity of the issue.

Trailnet is currently working with the communities of Ferguson, De Soto, Old North St. Louis, and the West End to create model healthy and active communities. With a phenomenal group of community partners that include elected officials, city planners, parks and rec staff, school officials and more, we are focused on getting to the root causes of the obesity epidemic. Our work focuses on creating long-term change through the physical environment, supportive social networks, and policies (for example, increasing Physical Education time in the schools). At the core of our approach, we are interested in ensuring individuals have healthy choices.

Below are two links related to the need for this sort of broad, community-wide intervention.

A Reuters article about the American Heart Association:
http://www.reuters.com/article/healthNews/idUSARM14811020080701

A list of interventions that have proven to be successful for increasing physical activity:
http://www.thecommunityguide.org/pa/default.htm