Farm to School Summit - Register Now!

Farm to School is growing rapidly and it is time to share lessons of the many unique programs in this state, as well as the trends throughout the region and the United States.

Please join us for the first Farm to School Summit in Wisconsin – January 25th, 2012, in conjunction with the WI Local Foods Network conference on the 26th and 27th in Delavan, WI.

For more information and to register visit the Farm to School Summit page.

Top Ten Tips for Evaluating Evidence-Based Initiatives - upcoming webinar

The next webinar in Wisconsin’s Empowering Coalitions for Community Change series will be held on Thursday, December 1 from 11:00am – 12:00pm CT.

“Top Ten” Tips for Evaluating Evidence-based Initiatives

Presenter: Mary Michaud, Health Forward Consulting

Mary Michaud will share her “Top Ten” Evaluation Tips. Join us for ideas on how to connect with current evidence and how to evaluate initiatives in ways that are practical, useful and meaningful for stakeholders.

To join the webinar, simply click the link above. This and other webinar links (past and upcoming) may also be found HERE on the NPAO Program website.

Please forward to anyone who may be interested.

If you have any questions or technical difficulties, please contact Jordan.bingham@Wisconsin.gov.

Make the right choice the easy choice.

Interview with Alan Balch, vice president of the Preventative Health Partnership on the intersection between public health and environmental health:

What do you see as the greatest commonalities between the preventative health movement and the environmental sustainability movement?

There has long been a clear intersection between public health and environmental health, especially when you consider issues like air pollution, water pollution, and land pollution. Most of the federal and state laws in those areas are first and foremost designed to protect people's health. In terms of the sustainability movement, I think those issues have become increasingly more congruent with the preventive health agenda in recent years.

The big push now in preventive and public health is "healthy communities." Numerous organizations from the government, academic, nonprofit, and private sectors are rallying around this theme. Although the specific tactics being pursued at the local level vary from place to place, some activities that the preventative health movement has in common with the sustainability movement include:

• Local fruit and vegetable production and consumption through home gardens, farmers markets, and farm-to-school programs;
  


• creation and expansion of bike lanes, sidewalks, and walking paths to create "walkable cities, schools, and shopping";
  


• reducing or eliminating the use of toxic chemicals in cleaning products in public institutions; and
  


• preservation or creation of parks and open space for multiple use.
  

In your view, what are the most effective practical ways to empower people to make the “right” choices, whether for their personal health and well-being, or for the environment? Does conventional advertising work, or do we need to adopt new tactics?


The answer is as simple conceptually as it is elusive from a practical perspective: make the right choice the easy choice. We've created an economic culture that is based on immediate gratification, convenience, and irrationality. Many people want to be more conscious consumers both for their personal health and environmental health, but those issues are not necessarily top of mind at the point of consumption and, if they are, it might not be readily apparent how to exercise those preferences quickly and in the context of other factors that drive consumer behavior.

Messaging or advertising is not effective unless it is used to drive people to resources, tools, and products that make it easier for them to express their long-term preferences for deferred benefits like better health.

To me, there are four interrelated strategies for creating real change, and I think the geo-political focus for these should be at the local and community level and not the federal level:

Built environment: look for opportunities to change or create permanent infrastructure in a way that supports the behaviors you want changed or reinforced.

Policy: look for opportunities to create policies at the government and corporate level that either make it easier to make the right choice or harder to make the less preferable choice.

Programs: institute programs that provide people with the capacity or pathway to making the right choice.

Partner: find other active groups to work with who have a similar or same agenda even if their concerns are different.

Impacting Health Policy webinar

The next webinar in Wisconsin’s Empowering Coalitions for Community Change series will be held on Thursday, November 17 from 11:00am – 12:00pm CT.

Impacting Health Policy by Building Relationships with your Policymakers

Presenter: Steve Elliott, Policy & Grassroots Specialist, HealthFirst Wisconsin

Steve Elliott joins us again to share practical strategies for educating policymakers about best-practice policies for prevention of obesity and chronic disease. Whether you work at the local or state level, Steve’s tips will help you and your coalition colleagues to initiate and sustain relationships with policymakers, positioning yourselves as the valuable content experts that you are!

To join the webinar, simply click the link above. This and other webinar links (past and upcoming) may also be found HERE on the NPAO Program website.

If you have any questions or technical difficulties, please contact Jordan.Bingham@Wisconsin.gov.

Cooking and Public Health: How to Help Families Discover Good Food on The Atlantic

Conversation with Maryland Secretary of Health and Mental Hygiene Dr. Joshua Sharfstein and cookbook author Sally Sampson on a new state initiative to improve healthy eating among Maryland families.

We've made it a priority to use foods that are accessible and affordable and recipes that are simple and kid friendly. We use recipes from all different cultures and we don't beat anyone up with our message of healthy eating: We strive to make it fun and hope that the rest follows from there. So my guess is that many people -- not just you -- can get their children to eat healthy foods by getting them involved in the process rather than lecturing to them about what they should and shouldn't be eating.

Public health, prevention, and proposed cuts to food and nutrition programs.

Falling Through the Cracks in the Deficit Debate on The Huffington Post

On proposed cuts to the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children:

WIC is a short-term preventative public health nutrition program designed to influence lifetime nutrition and health behaviors in a targeted, high-risk population. WIC-approved foods are selected for their nutritional value to supplement the nutrients found lacking in the diets of low-income populations. As one WIC participant in Scott County, IA stated, WIC's nutrition education has, "laid the foundation for healthy eating habits for years to come."

With the nation's obesity rates continuing to rise, and two-thirds of adults and nearly one-third of children and teens currently obese or overweight and at increased risk for over 20 major diseases, including type 2 diabetes and heart disease, according to the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, now is not the time for Congress to consider funding cuts to WIC.

Should Congress fail to successfully meet its agreed upon deficit reduction target of $1.2 trillion, WIC could be hit with dramatic funding cuts resulting in more than 700,000 vulnerable mothers and young children being cut off from critical WIC nutrition services, depriving young children the opportunity of a healthy start on life, taking away purchasing power in local economies, and increasing the nation's long-term healthcare costs. Moreover, deficit reduction targets for future years could see further dramatic cuts to WIC.

A serious attempt to grapple with deficit reduction begins with sound investments in the health and well-being of our nation’s families and communities, not with slashing vital food and nutrition programs, like WIC, that contribute to long-term health savings, workforce productivity, the nation’s competitiveness in a global economy, and national security.

Register here for Strategic Alliance for Healthy Food and Activity Environment's November 16 webinar on "The Role of Community Engagement in Creating Safe Places to Play." The webinar will begin at 10:30am.

Food Day webinars archived.

Catch up with any Wisconsin's Food Day webinars that you missed at this link.

From October 10

What you need to know about the farm bill – Important updates and information related to community and regional food systems

From October 24

Finding a common ground – How can agriculture and public health work together? Ideas from the CDC and USDA

From November 7

Where do we go from here in Wisconsin? – Coordinating activities to promote public health through food system innovations

#4. If You’re Not Hungry Enough to Eat an Apple, Then You’re Probably Not Hungry

Michael Pollan has released a new illustrated version of Food Rules. Read more at CivilEats.

School wellness policy experiences from D.C. parent.

Check out a great blog post over at The Slow Cook capturing one parent's role in helping to revise wellness policies in his daughter's school district.

Over the last several months I’ve been meeting with D.C. school officials and now it can be revealed: We have a new wellness policy that prohibits flavored milk and sugary cereals, requires that all children have at least 30 minutes to eat their food at lunch, limits classroom celebrations to just one per month and mandates that all food served on school grounds–including vending machines, school stores, bake sales and other fundraisers–comply with HealthierUS School Challenge gold-level standards.

Congress in 2004 mandated that all public schools must have a wellness policy in place that sets goals for nutrition education and physical activity and establishes guidelines for the food available during the school days. The federal law also requires that schools involve parents and students in developing the wellness policy. But it doesn’t give precise directions on how this is to be done, so parents in too many cases have been frustrated in their efforts to make wellness policy changes.

The policy is supposed to be updated every three years.

Fortunately for us in the District of Columbia, we now have a food services director–Jeffrey Mills–who would like nothing better than serve the kind of food Alice Waters would be proud of. I was pleasantly surprised at how open the process of revising our wellness policy was–even though I didn’t get everything I wanted.


[...]

As we are learning, however, drafting a policy and seeing it actually take effect can be two different things. For instance, in our last meeting we learned that while schools are required to provide at least 30 minutes of physical education for all primary grades, and 45 minutes in senior schools, some principals have instructed their PE teachers instead to have the kids read, to boost test scores. In fact, the school officials at the table urged me and other community members that the best way to address problems like that may be for us to draft a letter to the schools chancellor. Apparently, working up the chain of command doesn’t necessarily get results.

Yet under “Healthy Schools,” kids beginning in 2014 are supposed to be getting five times as much PE–150 hours per week in elementary school, 225 minutes per week in grades six through eight.

Similarly, although the wellness policy states that every child should have at least 30 minutes to eat lunch “after the last student passes through the line,” I don’t know of any school where that currently is the case. Especially in schools with high enrollment of low-income children, who tend to take the federally subsidized meal rather than bringing one from home, those lunch lines can be very long. In my daughter’s elementary school last year, for instance, the lunch period was only 30 minutes long, and the last kid who went through the line typically did not have much more than 15 minutes to eat.

Next on the agenda for the wellness committee may be figuring out how the school can arrange training sessions for staff so that they actually know what’s in the policy and what they need to do to comply with it. Federal rules require that the wellness policy be distributed to staff and made easily available to the public, such as by posting it on school websites and keeping copies for public inspection in the school office.

Other highlights: nutrition education that integrated into other content areas such as math, science, language arts and socials studies and teach “media literacy with an emphasis on food marketing.” Schools must provide at least 20 minutes of recess daily, and it should come before lunch “whenever possible.” Schools are required to increase participation in meal programs through a “coordinated, comprehensive outreach plan” that builds community coalitions and may include after-school cooking clubs for families, parent workshops and community/school gardens.

Under the federal mandate, we are also required to figure out a way to collect data and masure the impact of implementing the wellness policy. In other words, we still have our work cut out for us.

Obesity Prevention Policy in Wisconsin webinar.

The next webinar in Wisconsin’s Empowering Coalitions for Community Change series will be held on Thursday, November 3 from 11:00am – 12:00pm CST.

Obesity Prevention Policy in Wisconsin: Key Priorities and Coordination of State and Local Efforts

Presenters:

• Melissa Horn, Wisconsin Government Relations Director, American Heart Association


• Mary Pesik, Nutrition, Physical Activity and Obesity Program Coordinator, Wisconsin Division of Public Health


• Kyle Pfister, Policy Coordinator, Wisconsin Clearinghouse for Prevention Resources

Presenters will introduce key policy priorities for obesity prevention in Wisconsin. Join us to learn about effective tactics that can be applied to educate policymakers and build community support for high-impact policy change.

To join the webinar, click here.