Project Description

Background:
Childhood overweight and obesity has developed into such an epidemic in the United States that national health organizations such as the Institute of Medicine, Food and Nutrition Board, and Board on Health Promotion and Disease Prevention have termed it a national public health priority and a critical public health threat. According to the Institute of Medicine’s September 2006 Report Brief, one third of American children and youth are either obese or at risk of becoming obese. Over the past 30 years, the obesity rate has nearly tripled for children ages 2–5 years (from 5 to 14 percent) and youth ages 12–19 years (from 5 to 17 percent), and quadrupled for children ages 6–11 years (from 4 to 19 percent).

Aside from the fact that childhood obesity has become a nationwide crisis, it is clear that Boston’s South End community is suffering even more severely from this problem. The South End Community Health Center is a community-owned and operated non-profit health center that serves a diverse population of over 13,000 patients. It has been shown that 40% of the pediatric patients at this Health Center are overweight or clinically at risk for obesity.

Project:
The South End Community Health Center is in need of a pediatric exercise and nutrition program that can help their clinicians and nutritionists tackle the problem of overweight and obesity. Therefore, I plan to implement a weekly basketball and soccer program with a nutritional education component for children ages 8 to 13 who are overweight or at risk for obesity. It will provide overweight children of the South End with an accessible, supportive, and motivational source for exercise and nutritional education.

The nutritional education component will take place after each basketball or soccer session. I will play educational, interactive games and quizzes with the children on a laptop that teach them the importance and ease of proper daily nutrition and exercise. Topics that will be covered include the benefits of healthy versus unhealthy food choices, fun quizzes concerning calorie intake and burning, and games that educate the children about quick and easy ways to read nutrition labels.