Sunday, July 01, 2007
Healthy living
Hurt Park combats childhood obesity with active education
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Eric Brady | The Roanoke Times
Tanya Weigel, a health educator from the health department, runs the program. Here, she’s making a smoothie with pupils Terri Green (from left), Morgan Hancock and Miguel Pomales.
When the children were asked to write down their favorite foods, this was third-grader Cynthia Weaver's list.
Going to outdoors has other education benefits as well. Here, the Hurt Park Elementary pupils are on Mill Mountain and pointing to the wildlife (a chipmunk) they see. From left to right, Miguel Pomales, Amber Pease, Rosmery Araque, Diamond Turnage, Nashawn Wilson and Danielle Mills.
On an early spring afternoon, Morgan Hancock and a group of other children dug shovels into the dry soil of a small garden behind Hurt Park Elementary School.
After Morgan made a small hole, the 9-year-old in hoop earrings dropped in a potato spud and covered it with soil. Then she skipped off to plant broccoli.
As Morgan and the children gardened, each step they took registered on plastic pedometers clipped to the left front pockets of their pants.
The gardening and the pedometers were part of Hurt Park Healthy Living, a Roanoke City Health Department program that aims to bring healthy-living skills to children who need them most.
Childhood obesity has pushed into the spotlight as a national health concern, and statistics show children do not suffer equally.
Among children ages 10 to 17, 38 percent of those from low-income families are overweight or obese compared with 26 percent of children from wealthier families, according to the Annie E. Casey Foundation. Among minority children, 41 percent of black children and 38 percent of Hispanic children are overweight or obese compared with 27 percent of white children.
At Hurt Park Elementary, where 65 percent of students are black and 96 percent qualify for free or reduced-price lunches, those statistics put a majority of the children at risk. That's why the health department chose to start its pilot healthy-living program at the school, said Stephanie Harper, the district health director.
"All of us are affected with issues of weight and obesity," Harper said. "We could have gone anywhere in the city, but we know here there is a great need."
It's not about weight loss
The after-school program, which began the last week of January and is funded for two years, pairs the health department with Roanoke City Public Schools, Parks and Recreation, the Virginia Cooperative Extension and Carilion Roanoke Memorial Hospital.
Twice a week after school, teachers from the partner agencies taught 28 children from the third, fourth and fifth grades about nutrition and fitness. They sponsored trips to Mill Mountain, cooking nights and a series of hip-hop aerobics sessions.
The activities were meant to knock the children and their families out of the sedentary lifestyles that lead to expanding waist sizes and side effects of obesity, including high blood pressure, hypertension and diabetes.
It is not a weight-loss program, but a way to increase healthy eating and physical activity, said Tanya Weigel, the 27-year-old health educator who runs the program.
"If a child is overweight, it will address that issue," she said. "If they form healthy habits now, it should help them as they grow to maintain a healthy weight."
During a family night at the school, Weigel helped the children and some parents make pizzas using whole-wheat crusts, turkey pepperoni and low-fat cheese. After dinner, they drank fruit smoothies.
After she finished her pizza, Morgan showed off the purple folder where every night before bed she records the steps from her pedometer.
Morgan belonged to the red team, one of four in the program. The children competed to see which team would take the most steps before school let out in May.
Morgan's mother, Charlotte Hancock, said the program seems to be helping her daughter. Doctors told her Morgan needs to lose weight to bring down her high glucose level.
Hancock said her daughter thinks of the pedometer as a piece of clothing, a fun new gadget.
"Even when she was out sick with asthma, she would put it on in the morning and walk around the house," Hancock said.
"She puts it on to go to church," added Morgan's father, Steve Welcher. "I said, 'Honey, you are not going to be moving much in church,' but she still wanted to wear it anyway."
Charlotte Hancock thinks Morgan, who weighed 90 pounds at her last doctor's visit, has lost about 5 pounds while participating in the program. On weekends, Morgan's parents take her to her grandmother's house at Lincoln Terrace to walk. In Forest Park, the Northwest Roanoke neighborhood where Morgan lives, there are no sidewalks.
An uphill battle
Health experts say there are many reasons why poor and minority children have higher levels of obesity than other children.
In addition to having fewer safe places to play, the children have less access to fruits and vegetables and other healthy foods, which often cost more than high-calorie packaged and processed foods.
Further, the children's parents are more likely to be overweight than children from white or more affluent families.
It's difficult, said Tracy Reyes, a single mother of five children, one of whom is in the Hurt Park program. So far, Reyes has been successful. All of her children are thin. The most important thing, she said, is to find a baby sitter who does more than park the children in front of the television.
"We don't allow a lot of TV time," she said. "If they get soda, it's a treat. If you do it now, it will be a habit when they get older."
If those good habits are not learned at a young age, the damage can be hard to undo. Elizabeth Guilfoyle, a family nurse practitioner at Hurt Park Teen Center, a nonprofit clinic a block from Hurt Park Elementary, said obesity is the greatest problem she faces at the clinic.
"A lot of children struggle just to get up onto the [examination] table," she said.
During seven months in 2005 and 2006, Guilfoyle recorded the body mass index scores of 258 patients, most of whom ranged from ages 10 to 19.
She found that 48 percent of her patients were overweight or obese, which is 18 percentage points higher than the 2003 state average for children 10 to 17.
But what shocked Guilfoyle most is that 27 percent of the children she measured were morbidly obese. Because the risks of obesity increase by degree, these children are the most likely to suffer health problems, she said.
One 13-year-old girl maxed out the clinic's 350-pound scale, Guilfoyle said. "Here is a girl with a BMI so high I can't record it. It's an extreme case, but it just highlights the problem."
Often the children come to the clinic with their parents. Guilfoyle counsels them on weight loss and healthy living. But after they leave, Guilfoyle rarely has a chance to keep up with their progress.
She hopes to start a weight-loss program at the clinic. For a program to work, she said, you've got to have parental involvement because parents make the food decisions.
At the Hurt Park Elementary program, most of the resources target the children, but parents were also given pedometers and were invited to family nights. Participation was uneven. Several parents, including Hancock and Reyes, attended most sessions, but some other parents never showed up.
Carlton Bell, Hurt Park's principal, said the program is trying to improve parent participation.
Habits die hard
As the dietary supervisor at the Lewis-Gale Medical Center pavilion, Charlotte Hancock's job is to follow strict dietary guidelines when preparing meals for patients.
At home, however, Hancock has found it difficult to follow through with the lessons Morgan has learned in the program. She's buying snacks in single-serving packets and low-sodium and fat-free sauces. But "old habits are hard to break," she says. When her children ask for fried chicken instead of the baked chicken she had planned on making, Hancock finds it hard to say no.
Harper and Weigel know it's hard. Before the children went home for the summer, they were already planning for next year. They hoped the program would expand. They had been talking with Save-a-Lot, a Hurt Park grocery store, about stocking ingredients for healthy recipes the program will send to parents in a newsletter.
There is more work to do, but both women felt the program had done well, especially with the pedometers. Though the red team did not win (the green team did), Morgan turned out to be one of the top three walkers in the program, Weigel said, logging 539,295 total steps.
As a reward, each child in the program received new tennis shoes. Already, Weigel said this year's second-graders were asking about when they can get their pedometers.
Features editor Kathy Lu contributed to this report.
