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  • E245: Menus of Change Collaborative - shaping college student eating habits for life

    E245: Menus of Change Collaborative - shaping college student eating habits for life
    2024/09/09
    When you hear university dining, you likely have images in your mind of college students with trays and hand waiting in a line for a meal in a dining hall. You may even think of a food court or a trendy food hall in the cool part of town. But there is so much more happening behind the scenes. Today we will learn about Menus of Change University Research Collaborative, MCURC for short, which is a nationwide network of colleges and universities using campus dining halls as living laboratories for behavior change. The Collaborative's goals are to move people towards healthier, more sustainable and delicious foods using evidence-based research, education and innovation. Our guest today is the Collaborative's co-founder and co-director, Stanford University's Sophie Egan. Interview Summary I'd like you to tell our listeners a little bit more about the Menus of Change University Research Collaborative. What is it and how does it actually work? The Menus of Change University Research Collaborative was co-founded by the Culinary Institute of America and Stanford University, two divisions there, the Stanford Prevention Research Center and the School of Medicine, and Residential and Dining Enterprises. And that should tell you something is different in our vision, which is that first and foremost, we wanted to break down silos that exist on campuses between experts in food who work in academic realms. So, researchers, faculty who may be studying food, either from one certain discipline or ideally some cases transdisciplinarily, and those who actually feed students, the experts in the dining programs on campus. And Stanford was a good place to co-found this because of this great partnership that already existed between the dining program and between Dr. Christopher Gardner at the School of Medicine. But that model has actually now been replicated. We are at 70 plus institutions, not only across the U.S., but actually increasingly internationally. In addition to fostering that collaboration and breaking down those silos on a given campus, we really wanted to foster collaboration between universities to take what we consider kind of a plug-and-play research protocol. You know, a given design of a study that, as you said, uses campus dining halls as living laboratories and actually replicate research. So that's what we've done. It's been incredibly fun to be part of it from the beginning, and it's been incredibly exciting and impactful because of the approach that we take. We really democratize even what it means to be a researcher, to be involved in research. We have involvement in the collaborative and in research projects from students, faculty, of course, who are critical in their expertise, but also executive chefs, nutrition and sustainability experts. And many other research collaborators who are mission aligned organizations like EAT and REFED and Food for Climate League, who bring their own kind of comparable expertise. And we all work together to shape these living lab studies and then to test those at multiple sites to see if this a more generalizable effect? Or is that something just those west coast schools work for? Or is this only something that, you know, more elite schools where students of a certain demographic really respond? But that's also the beauty is the diversity of the institutions that we have. Geographically, public private, small and large. And we're really brought together by the kind of common language of what's also in our name, Menus of Change. And these are these principles of optimizing both human and planetary health through the food on our plates. And for us really, especially through students, changing that trajectory and cultivating the long term wellbeing of all people in the planet, one student, one meal at a time. Wow. This sounds like a really amazing program. And I love the fact that you're working across different types of universities across the U.S. and even outside. And it does make me believe that the findings that you have are applicable in a broader setting than if one institution does it. I can appreciate the power of the Collaborative. I want to know a little bit more about the impact of the collaborative. What has it been up to this point and in what ways have you seen this collaborative generate new ideas or new research findings? Yes. So, we've got about six peer reviewed publications under our belt with more on the way. Our latest is called the University Procurement and Planetary Health Study led by Dr. Jackie Bertoldo, who was at the Johns Hopkins University and also Stanford Food Institute. But we have a number of academic publications also in the works. And then importantly, we actually have produced 13 operational publications and reports. So, what that illustrates is that we've come to realize that those that are collaborating have different currencies. Publishing in a peer reviewed journal, that's what motivates academic researchers, right? That's ...
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    29 分
  • E244: US Food History - food as a tool for oppression

    E244: US Food History - food as a tool for oppression
    2024/09/04
    Today we discuss a new and provocatively titled book written by Southwestern Law School professor Andrea Freeman, an expert on issues of race, food policy, and health from both legal and policy perspectives. The book's title, Ruin Their Crops on the Ground, the Politics of Food in the United States from the Trail of Tears to School Lunch, has been called the first and definitive history of the use of food in the United States law and politics as a weapon of conquest and control. Freeman argues that the U. S. food law and policy process has both created and maintained racial and social inequity. She documents governmental policies from colonization to slavery; to the commodities supplied to Native American reservations. She argues that the long-standing alliance between government and the food industry has produced racial health disparities to this day. Interview Summary Let's talk about the title of your book. What are you trying to communicate? So 'ruin their crops on the ground' is a paraphrase of what George Washington ordered his troops to do, to try to displace Indigenous people and take over their land. That's a pretty powerful image to think about that. So, in your book, you use the term food oppression. Can you explain what you mean? Yes. So I originally started writing about food oppression as the alliance between corporations, the food and agricultural industries, and the government that [00:02:00] create stark health disparities on a racial basis, sometimes gender and class. And as I've come through thinking about this over the years, I'm also using it to describe the way that food has always been used as a tool of subordination by the U.S. Government in history. An interaction between the industry and government isn't inherently oppressive. How does it come to be that way? I mean, it could be good, good for the public, it could be bad, but why does it, how does it become oppressive?​ Yeah, I agree that the problem with the food industry is that the desire to make profits is in conflict with the nutritional needs of people that the U.S., Government programs focus on nutrition are supposed to be serving. Let's go back to some of the earlier times. You've written about the role that food played in slavery. Could you explain? Absolutely. So, enslavers were very careful about the portions and the type of food that they gave to people. the people that they enslaved. And they would write pamphlets and advise each other. Hoping to find a balance to give enslaved people enough food to be able to work and be alive, but not enough to give them the energy to revolt or perform acts of resistance that they inevitably did. And then food was used to create hierarchies within enslaved peoples. It was used to, I don't know, take away pleasure, really, from life to oppress people in so many ways. And so, not just from the content of the food, but even the way that food was delivered. So, instead of eating on plates, food might be poured into a pig trough or scattered on the ground, right? There are so many ways that enslavers used food to try to degrade and subordinate people through either the portions or the content or the delivery. Food is such a fundamental and kind of elementary form of reinforcement. You could imagine it being used to punish particular individuals and reward others. Absolutely. And the law backed up the way that enslavers used food. And even when enslaved people wanted to grow their own food, and perhaps sell it to gain some advantage, the law prevented that. Enslavers might just take over those gardens. Steal the food. Use it for their own purposes. That was all perfectly legal. And the law tried to protect other enslavers from having enslaved people come and steal their food by having some laws in place that said, you must give adequate provisions, which looked like something that might protect enslaved people, but in fact was only to protect other enslavers. Going back to the title of your book, it makes reference to the Trail of Tears. And people have highly varying levels of knowledge of what the Trail of Tears refers to. In North Carolina, it's a really important and tragic part of the state's history for the native individuals living in the western part of the state. But could you tell us more about how food figured into this, what it was and how food figured in? Of course. So the United States wanted the land that Indigenous people were living on. And they designated a part of the country that covers Oklahoma and some states around there and called it the Indian Country or Indian Territory. And to try to force indigenous people to move to that land and to make a journey across the country that was so dangerous, and ended up killing maybe half of the people who made that journey, they destroyed the food sources of people. They had no choice at all. They were starving. They either had to go or die there with no food. And food played into the promises that were made by the United...
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    16 分
  • E243: Uplifting women in agriculture: a pathway to agritech innovation

    E243: Uplifting women in agriculture: a pathway to agritech innovation
    2024/08/27
    Empowering Women in AgriFood Tech: A Conversation with Amy Wu of From Farms to Incubators - In this episode of the Leading Voices in Food podcast, host Norbert Wilson speaks with Amy Wu, the creator and content director of From Farms to Incubators. Amy shares her inspiring journey in highlighting and supporting women, particularly women of color, in the agri-food tech industry. Learn about the origins of her groundbreaking documentary and book, her vision for a vibrant community of women innovators, and the crucial role of education, mentorship, and policy in advancing women's roles in this sector. Interview Summary I have a great set of questions for you. So, the first thing, could you just tell our listeners a little bit more about From Farms to Incubators? Sure. From Farms to Incubators is a special initiative and project that tells the stories of women in this fast-growing field known as ag tech, sometimes interchangeably used as Agri food tech as well. The mission of it is really to get more women involved in ag tech through storytelling, through resources, and also through education and training. I also would describe it as a multimedia content platform. I actually came to this as a journalist and as a storyteller that uses storytelling to amplify the voices of women leaders and entrepreneurs in this field. It's also a documentary and a book and also a website where we archive their stories and their biographies as well. Thanks for that overview, and you just talked about the book and the documentary From Farms to Incubators: women innovators revolutionizing how our food is grown, which uses storytelling to highlight women innovators and how women innovators in the Agri food tech are doing their best. But there's also a movement and the community and this multimedia platform. Why did you expand from the book and documentary into this larger network? That's a really good question. Briefly, as some context, I kind of fell into this project. It was a bit of serendipity. I was a reporter in Salinas, California, which is the vegetable salad bowl of the world. Ag is a huge industry, a 10 billion industry. And I was covering government and agriculture. And I observed that there were not a lot of women at the helm of the table, whether it be at farms or also in this growing field of ag tech as well. So it started off as a documentary. I got a grant from the International Center for Journalists, and then ultimately I got another grant from the International Media Women's Foundation to do a short documentary to profile three women who are entrepreneurs in ag tech. It was great. It was at the time in 2016, which now was ages ago, I guess. It was really hard to find women in ag, in this field of ag tech, women creating the innovations to tackle some of the biggest challenges that farmers are facing, especially under climate change. So, it could have ended there because the documentary turned out to be very, very well received. It's screened at hundreds of places, and I would have panels and discussions and the women would look at each other like, 'my gosh, I didn't know there were other women doing this too. Can you connect us? We'd love to convene further.' And then educators, community leaders, agribusinesses, investors just didn't know they existed as well. So, what happened was the stories kind of multiplied and multiplied as the more that I collected them. And then I decided to put it into a book profiling about 30 women in this growing field. And to answer your question, Norbert, why is it continuing is that I saw a real need for women to have a community, women in agriculture and innovation and food systems to have a community to connect with one another, to potentially build friendship, build collaboration, build partnership, creating a collective vision sometimes and a place for them. I didn't plan on it. So, I guess the storytelling connects them. We've also have resources like a database that connects them and the goal is really so that they can have a community where they can build more. They can either build out their own startups. They can build their careers, build their professions. And then it kind of grew more legs. Now we're also extending into the area of education and training to try to get younger women, young people, youth. To see that agriculture, hey, may not be traditionally sexy. I mean, tractors and overalls are still what a lot of people think about it, but there are so many other opportunities in the food system for young people as well, especially since we all have to eat. So, how are farmers going to be producing the food for 10 billion people in 2050, right? Who's going to produce the food? How are we going to do it? Especially under the auspices of climate change, the weather's getting crazier and crazier. That's sort of why it has expanded from the stories all the way to what it is today. This is a great story and I would love to hear a little bit more about some of the ...
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    29 分
  • E242: Revamping debt for nature swaps could support resilient food systems

    E242: Revamping debt for nature swaps could support resilient food systems
    2024/08/23
    In today's discussion, we will explore the application of debt relief to large investments in environmental sustainability, which can also support local development, including more resilient food systems. This is particularly timely, given the juxtaposition of enormous debt burdens with increasing environmental commitments by developing countries. Debt for relief swaps, such as financial forgiveness for cash strapped countries if they invest those funds to support global environmental goods, have been around since the 1980s. However, they haven't achieved their full economic or environmental potential, says Duke University Economic and Environmental Policy Professor Alex Pfaff. Smart reforms to improve debt relief programs can allow nations to help themselves and fulfill commitments to preserve the planet. Pfaff and colleagues described needed reforms in a recent analysis in a policy forum for the journal Science, also summarized in Foreign Policy magazine. His co-authors are sustainability expert Elizabeth Losos and conservation professor Stuart Pimm from Duke University. They note that global society has now learned lessons, not only from past debt for nature swaps, but also decades of evaluation of climate change of environmental and development policies. Interview Summary I have to say, having read particularly the Science piece, it is clear and it's very straightforward and accessible. But the other thing, it's hopeful. And I think in this moment of climate concerns, it's great to know that there's some ways to possibly move forward. I'd love to hear some more about this. If you don't mind, would you just describe a debt for nature swap? I gave a little bit, but I'd love to hear your consideration of it. What you said is right. And I'll just agree with you first that we're definitely in a time when doing the right things could help a lot. One of my motivations is a little bit of fear in there, which is, if we don't take the opportunity we look back later and regret it. Which is one of the reasons why we're out there trying to bother people to do what we think would be more effective. So, coming to the definition. A debt for nature swap, as you said is like it sounds. It's an agreement to forgive debt that countries owe on one condition - that they invest part of that money in some form of investment in nature. It's often been conservation. That was often thought of in terms of species or biodiversity at the time. But nowadays that would include thinking about storing carbon because of climate concerns, and then linking to your use of the term resilience in agriculture - for sure this also could be thinking about a climate adaptation. Can you give us some examples of countries that have done this? What does this look like on the ground? Yes, and the history, as you say, is that it started in the 1980s. And we really want to tip our cap to Tom Lovejoy who invented this at a time when, again, as you laid out, but it, at that time, was also true. There was huge amounts of debt and huge concerns about conservation, and it was a pretty simple idea. That it is a potential source of money to invest where the countries can help themselves, as you said, by getting rid of really quite crippling debt - tremendous amounts of interest are being paid on those debts - but also be helping the globe by investing in nature. So countries recently done, for instance, Ecuador has done a very big one recently. Belize has done one that's quite well spoken of. Those are different sized countries, different sized problems, which, as you can imagine from your own work, the institutions matter a lot. But there's been a long string and a long history of willingness to try. And I guess the last thing is that willingness started to go down when, as you summarized, it wasn't really working for the debtors who weren't really getting that much relief in their point of view for a lot of time bargaining. And it wasn't really working perhaps for nature. It wasn't having necessarily the impacts that one might have hoped. So, I think the question now is can we reform them? Because we do still have a big debt problem and we have some big nature problems. Thank you for sharing that. And it's really fascinating to know that this is not a new idea. It's been around since the 80s. And this hope that I mentioned earlier suggests that there can be ways to make this debt for nature swap work better. I would love to understand what you want readers to take away from the reforms that you all suggest in the article. Yes, and the punch line at the high level is it makes sense. It hasn't worked as done to first order. Of course, some things have worked. But simple reforms based on things that we have learned over the last few decades could make them work a lot better. So that's the high level. To get a little more detail the four things we say in those articles are the following. You gotta raise the scale. It has to be consequential relative to the...
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    18 分
  • E241: What is the connection between the gut and our brain?

    E241: What is the connection between the gut and our brain?
    2024/08/13
    We've recorded a series of podcasts on the microbiome and its wide ranging impacts. But boy is this a field that moves rapidly. As soon as you think you've covered much of the territory, along comes some new and exciting findings, and this is the case today. We're going to describe research done by our guest, Dr. Ibrahim Javed. He has done innovative work on links between the gut microbiome and the brain, particularly focused on Alzheimer's disease. Dr. Javed is an Enterprise Fellow and National Health and Medicine Research Council Emerging Leadership Fellow in Clinical and Health Sciences at the University of South Australia. Interview Transcript So let's begin, if you wouldn't mind, with an explanation from you about what the gut brain axis is and tell us how it's important. Yep. Now we see a lot of, a lot of researchers around the globe building on investigations around the gut brain axis. But if we, if we investigate what this gut brain axis actually is, It's kind of like a bi-directional communication between two organs in our body, the gut and the brain. And when we particularly talk about gut, we have our stomach and our different portions of the intestine. What we're actually interested in is the microbiome and all those small little things living inside the gut. There are around 100 trillion microbes in the gut, which is three times more than the number of cells in our body. So, we are kind of like more microbes than, than human cells. And they communicate with different organs in our body and how they communicate with the brain that we can describe it as a, as a gut brain axis. And then this whole gut brain axis thing was somehow kind of invisible to us. We were just looking at it as a fecal material or waste coming out of our body. But now we see a lot of importance to these gut microbes. They help us in a lot of daily things that we do. They shape our behavior, our response to stress, our immune system, and then how we respond to different medicines, and how we do our daily tasks. So, they have a lot of roles in that. They help us digest food, that's their main obvious function. But now we are more. getting more and more information about them, that how they are integrated with a lot of different things in our body. So, kind of like they are partners in our life. That's a very, very nice explanation. Can you tell us about the importance of microbial diversity? Yep. So microbial diversity, we can, we can refer to, to as a composition of all those bacteria, viruses, and fungi to some extent that, that live in, in our body. Digestive track and, and in a lot of other animals as well. And this diversity is very crucial in maintaining the gut health and on overall well-being of, of humans. And, and this microbiome whole thing is like, it is obviously associated with a lot of health benefits and, and how we develop disease, but it's also right from the beginning of life they help us in developing our brains. They help us mature the brain system and the immune system. Obviously, they help us in digesting food. So, generally, we can actually divide them in two portions. One, we can call them a good gut bacterium. They help us with all these things. And then they are bad gut bacteria, which are kind of like kept within a within a bay. They are kept under control by this good gut bacteria with the help of the rest of our body. And in somehow in some conditions with the age or with the dietary habits or environmental factor or lifestyle, if they overcome and, and they take over the control in the gut, that's where the thing starts going haywire. When I was growing up, microbes were a bad thing. You didn't want to have microbes. And now, now we hear that there are good microbes and now you're talking about the balance. There are still bad ones, but good ones. And the balance of those two was a really important thing. Let's talk about how bad bacteria find their way to the brain. How do they get access? So, as we discussed, they are kept within the bay or kept under control by good bacteria and also by other different immune systems in the body. We have different checkpoints, like we have different barriers or three different compartments, the gut and the blood and the brain. And we have barriers that separate out these compartments and these barriers are very tightly controlled, very good health cells tightly integrated with each other and they police that whole things what need to go across and what does not need to go across what we need to stop it within that compartment. If we have adverse environmental factors, or poor dietary habits and these bad gut bacteria overcome, they produce a lot of different molecules to communicate with each other. And they produce a lot of different molecules to take over the good bacteria. And these molecules, they can get across those barriers, and specifically if they can get into the brain (that's what we are researching), they can do a lot of different bad things ...
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    13 分
  • E240: Do food companies manipulate us with sports sponsorships?

    E240: Do food companies manipulate us with sports sponsorships?
    2024/07/30
    Food companies market their products in a great many ways. Connecting their brands and products to sports and major sporting events is one such way and is drawing a lot of attention now. The reason is that the Summer Olympics are underway, which trains attention on the relationship between the International Olympic Committee and its longest running sponsor. Coca Cola has been a sponsor of every Olympics since 1928. So, it's intuitively obvious why sponsorships would be important to the Olympics because They get lots of money in the door and it's reliable. It's been happening since 1928. But let's talk about why this relationship is so important to companies, Coca Cola in particular, and what the public health impact of that might be. Today's guest, Dr. Marie Bragg, has contributed some of the key studies on this topic. She is Assistant professor at the NYU Grossman School of Medicine, where she also serves as director of diversity initiatives. She holds an affiliate faculty appointment in the marketing department at the NYU Stern School of business; directs the NYU food environment and policy research coalition; and she's also a Food Leaders Fellow at the Aspen Institute. Interview Summary It's really nice to talk to you about this because it's an important issue and not a lot of science has been done on this over the years and you've contributed a lot of it. Let's talk about the issue of sports marketing and can you tell us a little bit more about what that is broadly and what's, what are some of the forms it takes? You just mentioned one of the main areas of sports marketing with sports sponsorships. And so that's where a company like Coca Cola partners with an organization like the Olympics. And really is paying for the rights to have that famous Coca Cola logo or its products to appear at sporting events or in commercials that are involving the Olympics. In terms of how much of it there is we know, for example, the world cup is one of the most watched sporting events in the world, along with things like the Olympics. The world cup, for example, has 5 million viewers. And so that's a lot of exposure for these brands, but it's not Sports sponsorship partnerships like that, there's athlete endorsements, and those dates back as far as to 1934, as one example, when baseball player Lou Gehrig first appeared on the box of Wheaties cereals. There's a special place that athletes have always had in our society, and I think it comes through with these sorts of partnerships. But if we fast forward to today, our lab has even seen these kinds of partnerships appear in video games. And so, Nintendo had M&M's a race car game a few years back, and NFL Madden, which is a popular video game even has things like the Snickers player of the game appear within the video game, just like real NFL games. What this means is that these pictures of brands and products are peppered throughout kids experiences when they're playing video games. And then finally, if, and probably for anyone who's, been in a supermarket, when there's a major sporting event going on, like the Super Bowl or March Madness, it appears on products too in supermarkets. It's peppered throughout our everyday experience in ways we might not always see or appreciate if we're not paying attention. Marie, I like to do sports trivia with some friends of mine, and you've just given me a great question about Lou Gehrig and the Wheaties box in the 1930s. So that's a nice benefit of this podcast. So aside from that, why sports? I mean, companies could attach themselves to lots of different things, but why did they choose sports and why is that such a valuable connection for them? One factor ties back into what we were saying about visibility. If there are millions of people watching a sport event, it means that there's a lot of time for brands to be able to have high visibility for whatever they're endorsing or sponsoring in that moment. On another level, I think on a deeper level, our society has a special relationship with sports and professional athletes. Professional athletes are their own sort of unique category of celebrities that people love to follow and admire. That means that when a brand associates themselves with a sports organization like the Olympics or a professional athlete, they're buying into a special idea of what it means to be cool, to be fun, and to feel good about to feel good about the brand because when people are watching sports, they're excited. If we think of other categories of life where there are maybe a high number of viewers to a specific televised event, like a presidential debate, that we don't see a lot of sponsorships around that. And maybe it doesn't evoke the same feelings that a sporting event does. I'm expecting that this kind of relationship or attachments or symbolism of the sponsorship of sports might be especially powerful for children. I know if you ask kids what they want to be when they grow up, a lot of them will say...
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    26 分
  • E239: National report on where the grocery stores are missing

    E239: National report on where the grocery stores are missing
    2024/07/16
    Today we're talking about who has access to full-service supermarkets in America's cities, suburbs, small towns and rural communities. According to The Reinvestment Fund's "2023 Limited Supermarket Access Analysis Report," 8.5% of people in the US live in areas with limited access to full-service supermarkets. This means that families must travel further to get fresh foods, and it creates a barrier to adequate nutrition. This is the 10th year The Reinvestment Fund has published the "Supermarket Access Report," which provides data and context about grocery store access across the country. Here to discuss the latest figures is policy and analyst Michael Norton. Interview Summary This is a really interesting and kind of nuanced topic, so I'm happy we can talk about it in some detail. Why don't we just start off with kind of a broad question. What do we know now about areas of limited supermarket access in the US? Kelly, I think the big thing to take away at the very beginning is that the share of people living in places that would be considered low access is roughly the same as it's been over the past 10 years. We have about 8.5% of the population living in low-access areas across the country. That's pretty consistent to what it's been for over a decade. But what's important is that how low-access areas are distributed across the country varies quite a bit. And where they exist, the density of the populations where they exist, really informs the kinds of interventions that are available for addressing these needs. These vary considerably in different parts of the country and at different geographic scales. And what I mean by that is suburban areas, rural areas, and then some of the most remote areas across the country. So we do have a sort of consistent number or share of people. The actual number has gone up a little bit because the population has continued to increase. They become distributed in different ways that follow different kinds of development patterns, on the one hand. But then also places where you end up getting patterns of residential and racial segregation in more developed parts of the country. It's so interesting. So, given that the average has stayed essentially the same over the 10 years you've been doing the reports, have there been pressures pulling in either direction that might have changed over the years? So, for example, are there pressures that are making access to full-service supermarkets less likely? Are they pulling out of some places, for example? And might that offset by some positive developments in other areas? So, while the average stays the same, the contours look different? I think the way to think about that is that we see a lot of expansion of low-access areas in the big metro areas that are expanding the fastest. So, the biggest increases in populations living with limited access are in big state in the South and out west in places like Arizona, Nevada, Texas, where you have these large metros that are growing at a really rapid rate. And the reason for that is that oftentimes residential development will show up before commercial development. So, in those kinds of places, food retail is trailing behind residential development. And probably those places are going to be well served by the time we update this analysis again in four or five years because of what those development patterns look like, right? So, when you're building more houses in more urban and remote areas, there's still folks who are first in buying out in those places. They're still going to have to go a long way to get their groceries for a few years until supermarket identifies this as a place where there's going to be enough demand for us to put one of our Krogers or Targets or Walmarts or what have you. But we've also seen, and this is more common in urban places, is the expansion of these low-access areas that have smaller populations, right? And so these are places with between 1,000 and 5,000 residents where folks are still having to go disproportionately far to get access to a full-service grocery store. Sometimes this is because stores have pulled out in these places because of limited demand, historically. And that limited demand is mostly because folks don't have as much income to spend on their groceries, right? And we see these little areas popping up within metro areas and even in some close-in suburbs and places across the country. And so you have sort of these bigger LSA areas, which have at least 5,000 residents on the outer edges of a lot of metros and in some within the cities, but mostly within the cities. It's these smaller, limited access, low population areas. And this differentiation of the type of low-access area is something that we introduced in this update to our analysis that previously wasn't available. It provided a really nice nuance to understanding what limited access to supermarkets looks like going forward, both within urban places, suburban places, and in...
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    18 分
  • E238: Celebrating the Successes of the Alliance for a Health Generation

    E238: Celebrating the Successes of the Alliance for a Health Generation
    2024/06/27
    Nonprofit organizations can play a very important role in building healthy communities by providing services that contribute to community stability, social mobility, public policy, and decision-making. Today we're speaking with Kathy Higgins, CEO of the Alliance for Healthier Generation. The Alliance is a nonprofit organization, a well-known one at that, that promotes healthy environments so that young people can achieve lifelong good health. Interview Summary Kathy, it's really wonderful to reconnect that you and I interacted some when you were in North Carolina and head of the Blue Cross and Blue Shield of North Carolina Foundation, and then you got called upon to be the CEO of the Alliance, a really interesting position. It's really wonderful to be able to talk to you again. Let's start maybe with a little bit of the history of the Alliance for a Healthier Generation. Can you tell us a bit about how it got started and over the years, how it's evolved? We've existed for almost 19 years now. We celebrate our 20-year anniversary next year. And we were started by two vital public health forces: the Clinton Foundation and President Clinton and also the American Heart Association. They came together 20 years ago and began discussing childhood obesity and what could a leading public health organization do to really work in systems change across the country at a local level. It is those two organizations that we look to as our founders and who helped us advance our work. It's a time flies story because it seems like just yesterday that the Alliance was created. There was a lot of excitement at the time for it, and over the work. It's done some really interesting things. So, in today's iteration of the Alliance, what are some of the main areas of focus? As I mentioned, we are a systems change organization. What we do is take a continuous improvement approach to advancing children's health. So, we are working typically in schools or after school time and certainly in communities to work on policy and practice change that are about promoting physical activity and healthy eating. And then addressing critical child health and adolescent health issues, which as we know, were exacerbated with the pandemic. Things like food access and social connectedness are just so important. Quality sleep, which our children are not getting enough of, or other things like vaping and tobacco sensation and on time vaccinations. Another thing that we know is that the pandemic had a dramatic impact on families and children on time vaccinations. So, this is the work that we do and working with the policy and practice change so that there there can be opportunity for healthy environments for the children. I think most everybody would probably agree that the targets that you're working on, healthy diet, physical activity, smoking, vaping habits and things like that are really important. But people might be a little less familiar with what you mean by addressing systems. Could you give some examples of what you mean by that? Right. What we know is that in United States, in fact, every public school must have a wellness policy and areas that need to be addressed. But what we'll do is work with the school in making sure that those policies are best suited for the families, the community, and the school, and what they want to do to support the health of children from a collaborative and supportive role. What we know is that we can create great change when that occurs. We work with more than 56,000 schools across the United States, and one of the things that we know is that our approach is really reflected in the America's Healthiest Schools recognition program each year. It's interesting to hear you talk about schools as an example of system change. And boy, working with 56,000 schools is pretty darn impressive. And it allows for out-sized influence of an organization like yours because if you can affect things like these school wellness policies and that gets multiplied across a ton of schools, it can really affect a lot of children. Exactly. We will work school to school, but we also work in districts and that allows us then to make even a bigger impact in the number of schools that we're reaching with these changes. It also brings the community together because then they're all operating under the same principles or the same focus areas of the work that they're committed to doing. What we do see is that we're able to assist them in implementing what are typically best practices in all sorts of topic areas. Whether it's strengthening the social emotional health and learning environment for the children, but also focusing on staff wellness. The whole notion, Kelly, of putting your oxygen mask on first before assisting others is something that has been incredibly important to us. We've certainly been very supported to do that work from a variety of funders. The other area that we've been able to make great strides in is this ...
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