Kaiser Grants $6.2M To Fight Obesity
Kaiser Permanente's Southern California region has granted $6.2 million to five government entities and community organizations to continue a battle against obesity and other signs of unhealthy living.
The grants will be used to promote what is known as Kaiser's Healthy Eating and Active Living (HEAL) initiative. It will be an extension of Kaiser's ongoing HEAL program, which the organization created a decade ago. The HEAL initiative focuses on change at multiple levels with an emphasis on environmental and policy change; changes in healthcare delivery, neighborhoods, schools, and workplaces sites, driven by community engagement. Most HEAL programs have been in low-income cities in California with high minority populations. They have driven changes in cafeteria menus in public schools and large employers, farmers markets in communities underserved by grocery stores; and how cities undertake approach urban planning and code enforcement.
The Anaheim Family YMCA, the City of Long Beach Department of Health and Human Services, the City of Ontario, the Riverside Community Health Foundation, and the Community Health Improvement Partners in San Diego County all received $1 million grants. Community Partners in Los Angeles will receive a $1.2 million grant to provide peer learning and technical assistance to all the other recipients.
The recipients will undertake a three-year initiative to increase consumption of healthy food and beverages, decrease calorie consumption, increase physical activity, and improve prevention, treatment, and management of obesity and its related conditions.
Although California has the fifth-lowest obesity rate in the United States, nearly a quarter of the state's residents are obese. The obesity rates among the Latino and African-American communities are also significantly higher than the statewide averages. It is nearly 35% among blacks. The rate of diabetes, at 10.3% of the overall population, is about mid-pack among the states, suggesting that the obesity issue is driving costly chronic health issues.
More than 505,000 Californians were diagnosed with obesity-related cases of cancer, a number that is projected to rise to 1.25 million by 2030, according to data from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.
“Since the inception of our HEAL program, we saw increased physical activity opportunities, greater availability of healthy food, improvements to our local parks, and a focus on safe places to walk. We and our community partners also learned that we can make a greater impact by addressing social and environmental factors that have an effect on healthy eating and active living behaviors, such as community safety and easy access to federal food programs,” said John Yamamoto, a Kaiser Permanente vice president of legal, government and community relations. “For Kaiser Permanente, the HEAL zones are an extension of the population health efforts of our medical providers. It is an upstream approach to promoting healthier communities and healthier people by bringing non-traditional partners from various sectors together, particularly in areas where there are health disparities.”
