Solving Lancashire’s obesity problem (Assignment 2 - article 2)

Blackpool has recently been recognised as an ‘obesogenic environment ,’ meaning that the lack of green space in the area is contributing to the rise in obesity.

Studies carried out by NHS Blackpool revealed the lack of health education, the congestive conditions and few exercise amenities available, are all contributing to Lancashire’s childhood and adult obesity problem.

Positive pathways for change
In an attempt to stabilise this problem, Blackpool Primary Care Trust is working alongside local authorities providing strategies and pathways for overweight adults and children.

The care pathway is designed to make help available at every stage in life and provide accessible guidance to those who want help losing weight.

Nikolas Storey, obesity coordinator for Blackpool Primary Care Trust, has been designing the pathway and formulating the action for Blackpool and other areas of Lancashire for the last six months. He said: “The strategies have a holistic approach and are based on simple, healthy lifestyle messages. They are based on encouragement and are implemented through frontline staff such as teachers, social workers, health practitioners and GPs.”

The strategy is based on four nationally recognised programmes: baby friendly; healthy eating; healthy schools and healthy futures.

Baby friendly programme
“Breast feeding is one of the only areas with strong evidence of obesity prevention,” adds Nikolas.

“There are strong links between babies who have been breast fed for the first year of their lives and a reduced chance of becoming obese. This fact is at the core of the ‘baby friendly programme,’ which encourages mums to breast feed their child for the first year of its life.”

NHS Blackpool has invested considerable amounts of money in the baby friendly initiative as Blackpool currently has the second lowest breast feeding rate in the country. The national average of 50% is where Blackpool hopes to be in terms of breastfeeding in the next five years.

Healthy eating programme
The ‘healthy eating programme’ works with children aged 1-5 and their parents to ensure mums and dads have the skills to be able to feed their child as healthily as possible.

The programme utilises the fact that the mum and child are together and provides cooking classes and physical activities that both parent and child can take part in.

“Providing a friendly and educative setting is so important for future eating patterns and the way you approach your lifestyle. That is one of the key focuses of this programme” added Nikolas.

Healthy schools programme
The healthy schools programme is designed to improve a school’s approach to a healthy lifestyle and looks at everything that head teachers, school nurses and healthy school’s coordinator’s can do make school children’s lives healthier.

Funded by the NHS and Blackpool council , the programme wants all schools in Blackpool to reach the status of ‘healthy school’ in the next two years. So far 60% have the status.

Healthy Futures
The healthy futures programme is commissioned by Blackpool Council and delivered by both the NHS and the council to help adults who want to change their unhealthy lifestyle.

The programme is characterised by the following three sectors:

· Active for health - an eight week course of group circuits and cardiovascular activity
· Plus Life – An educational talk once a week on how to eat healthily on a budget
· Cardiac Rehab – For those who are extremely obese, who have issue with their heart

“Difficulty”
Nikolas added: “What makes our programmes difficult is that we’re constantly fighting against the obesogenic environment. The media is so often inhibiting us from being healthy by suggesting it’s ‘too dangerous’ to walk to work alone.

“One of our main challenges is to combat this and overcome the environmental factors that stop us being the healthy nation that we used to be.

“Our challenge is to give people an option, give them a chance and give them a future.”

A Preston primary school’s fight against childhood obesity (Assignment 2 -article 1)

With one in four children starting school in Lancashire obese, Clayton Brook Primary school is playing a large part in trying to change this statistic.

The school, near Bamber Bridge in Preston, is applying the government’s ‘Every child matters campaign' by carrying out unique strategies such as parent and child cookery courses, school council meetings, and food tasting sessions to ensure every child is kept fit and healthy.

‘£119 million per year’
Figures released last month revealed the NHS in Lancashire are spending around £119 million a year on caring for and treating overweight adults and children and it’s expected this figure will increase.

Anne Smith, Head teacher at Clayton Brook primary, understands the importance of a school’s influence on a healthy lifestyle. She said: “I think everybody knows how influential a school is on children’s lives. From the nursery and reception stage children are encouraged to eat healthily, not only at lunch time, but with the snacks they choose to eat.”

Staying active
Every morning all the children are encouraged to take part in the ‘wake n’ shake’ activity. Lasting for about 15 minutes it aims to give all the children a healthy start to the day. With timetabled physical education of 1.5 hours per week, the ‘wake n’ shake,’ and after school sporting activities that take place most nights, Clayton Brook pupils are not short of physical exercise.

Choice
A further inventive initiative the school is involved with is letting children make up their own minds about what are healthy choices to eat.

The school council, made up of several infant and junior school pupils, meet with head cook Anne Taylor on a regular basis to discuss menus and decide what they would like to see on the menu. Anne said: “Obviously we can’t make them come up with healthy ideas, but we are finding that more and more the children are discussing and choosing healthier options.

“I find that my job is much more satisfying, when I’m cooking healthy food, and it’s nicer to think that you’ve made the end product rather than just bringing something out of the freezer.”

Parent learning
During the end of last term, Anne lead a cookery course for eight mums who wanted to learn how to cook properly and healthily. The course took the parents back to the basics of cookery and every Friday afternoon they were taught a new, traditional recipe. Anne added: “The course was really, really successful. We wanted to teach parents the basics of healthy cooking so hopefully when they went home at night they could cook real, substantial dishes for their children.”

Anne is currently going into other schools nearby to encourage and promote the course and hopes to carry on with the course at Clayton Brook this term.

Play the slideshow below to see what happens at Clayton Brook primary at lunchtime.

html practice

Again, quite a random blogpost, but I just wanted a little html practice...

NHS direct is designed to make a difference to the lives of people in England, 24 hours a day, 365 days of the year.

Booths

In order for me top have a little practice with a bit of multimedia - here is a google map showing all of the Booths supermarkets in Lancashire.

Booths, 'the great Northern supermarket is celebrating 160 years of trade and by doing so, the chain is releasing a book titled 'The story of Booths'

A little bit random I know.....but it's the joys of been a 'multi-skilled' journo!


View Larger Map

My first Google Map

Here is as a map to show how a student would walk from Foster Building to Greenbank Building at UClan.


View Larger Map

Who decides that your child is overweight?

A report recently published in the lep stated the horrifying statistic that 1 in 4 children starting primary school in Lancashire are overweight.

With such a shocking revelation has come the proposal to allow health chiefs to send letters home to parents telling them that their child is too heavy.

The strategy has its advantages as the aim here is to create healthier children, but obviously there is the issue of morality. In many situations, it's inevitable that some parents are going to be against this, as rightfully so, it is in theory the parents' job to decide.

Here I've spoken to a few Preston residents, asking them whether they think sending letters home is a good idea.

Not everyone can become obese. But why?!

Having recently subsribed to Dr Sharma's free feed http://www.drsharma.ca/ a story that smacked me in the face was about one of the most debated questions on obesity - the fact that not everyone is susceptible to weight gain.

Sharma identified a very significant point in his blog, which was that to prevent most cases of obesity, "principal contributors to weight gain in an individual" must be indentified as general studies for prevntion do not work.

Then going on to look at the brain being an issue (as mentioned in a previous blog) Sharma identified a very understandable point: "While some people may be quite happy with one piece of chocolate, others may need a whole box to experience the same level of satisfaction. Clearly, in a situation where chocolate supply is unlimited, the latter are more likely to overeat or have a much harder time controlling their intake than the former."

I can actually relate to this!

Ok I'm not obese, but I have friends who can buy a bar of chocolate, have one piece, and save the rest for later on the day. I for one could not do this!

Is obesity cool?!

After joining www.healthboards.com I am worried.

The obesity board, which I thought would be full of overweight people trying to make an effort to improve their health, sharing weight loss tips, concerns and triumphs, is in my opinion terrifying.

The title to a post that most concerned me was 'A breath of fresh air' by an individual with username 'fatandproud.' 'Fatandproud's outlook on life was: Obesity - 'It's a lifestyle. It's cool. It's the in thing. It's now.'

The disturbing fact here was that fatandproud does not seem to be alone and although he's from as far away as Arizona, US, I started to wonder if this new 'trend' had reached Britain.

Facebook, I thought, could help.

Sure enought it did. There were hundreds of obesity related groups and a large majority of them promoted obesity. Many were US based, but a worrying amount were started in the UK.

On particular group stood out: Couch Potatoing the best sport in the world. It had a catchline: "come join the sport that promotes equality peace and in some rare cases obesity." The group had about 50 UK members

Obesity facts

Ok, I only just posted a couple of hours ago, but I've came across a great site concerning obesity. http://www.obesityfacts.co.uk is a site belonging to Nick Brown, who posts regularly about the UK's obesity problem.

His site has infomation galore on a variety of problems surrounding obesity. Each blog post of his I have read so far has taught me something new and the topicality of his blogs are perfect.

It's free to subscribe to his feed - which I have done so already. For anyone interested in this massive socal problem I recommend you visit his site!

Obesity education...in Preston.....and it's free!

I have finally had some success in my mission to find children who are being eductated about food and diet and guess what - it's happening in our area.

MEND (Mind, Exercise, Nutrition…Do it!) is an organisation "dedicated to reducing global childhood overweight and obesity levels" and I have found programmes that are running right here in Preston!

Not only does the organisation look fun, engaging and beneficial, it's also free! I stumbled acroos it in the LEP itself after journalist Aasama Day ran a feature on nine year old Iona Jackson who weighs eight stone nine.

Wanting to know more I visited the MEND website http://www.mendprogramme.org/, which I must say, as an obesity blogger, got me excited!

The programme targets the perfect age group, seven to 13 year olds, at the perfect time, after school, for just the right amount of time, 10 weeks!

The only disappointmenting fcator I have found, is that it's privately funded. I'm not here knocking private funding, in fact I have admiration for companies who pour money into projects like this, it's just that I wish the central and local governments would do more.

Ok there's arguments for and against this, and I can imagine many tax payers will argue that they don't want to have to pay for other people's poor diets, but all in all, as I've previously mentioned, it should be on the curriculum.

At present 30% of children are overweight, which is a higher figure than the STI percentage in teenagers. Consequently if sex education is compulsory, then so should 'health and diet education.'

Lancashire Obesity

Visit http://www.lep.co.uk/news/Weighing-up-the-obesity-problem.4538813.jp#comments to view the last obesity article reported in lep.

My comment raises the question....Why can't part of the school curriculum be 'health
eductation'? Why can't our NHS run alongside the education service and provide education that could help prevent the increase in obesity?

"Another path that leads to obesity"

The BBC this morning published online an article based on US researchers finding yet another way in which obesity can be accomplished.


Apparently "having a poor diet can trigger a signalling system which prompts the body to consume even more." (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/7649261.stm) So basically eating unheathy makes you fat. Did society not establish that quite a few centuries ago? It seems to be that 'new findings' and 'new research,' with regards to obesity, always melt down to this same conclusion, and it's one I think I was taught in primary school.

This time however its all about the hypothalamus; a structure in the brain responsible for maintaining a constant and steady bodily state. According to Dongsheng Cai, assistant professor of physiology at the UW School of Medicine and Public Health, the cell-signalling pathway, known to be associsted with inflammation, has now been found to also influence the regulation of food intake.

Stimulating this pathway in mice led to an increase in their energy consumption, while suppressing the pathway encouraged them to maintain normal food intake, consequently regulating body weight.

Metabolic inflammation it seems is the big picture behind this particular research and a picture I can actually understand. Metabolic inflammation is caused by too much energy consumption and although less severe than other forms of inflammatory response - "it causes cellular dysfunction, which can decrease the regulation of several physiological processes, including metabolism.” (Breakthrough Digest Medical News Association.com)

The question is however, what does obesity look like in the North West of England?

North West Health

A common interest to us all is health. Our own health, our loved ones' health and the future of the nation's health all concern everyone of us and as British citizens it's the NHS at the centre of the picture.

The picture however, in today's media, is usually bleak. We're constantly being fed disaster stories on how the NHS has failed us and how the standard of care has dropped to what is often described as a 'catastrophic' level.

My blog is going to discuss and debate primarily 'social health issues', such as obesity, cigarette addiction and alcoholism, possibly the most dicussed and debated about health issues in contemporary media outputs.

The NHS has its own way of dealing with these issues, and like any national service - sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't.

The North West region will be the main focus throughout the blog, although national issues will quite often be the centre of discussion.