Environments That Support Healthy Choices Essay

It says: 1. Giving parents helpful information and fostering environments that support healthy choices, 2. Providing healthier foods in schools, 3. Ensuring that every family has access to healthy, affordable food, and 4. Helping children become more physically active (Let’s Move!). Here, they not only try to replace unhealthy foods with healthier ones, but also increase accessibility and affordability of healthy food for the families that cannot afford them. This cannot be done by profit-motivated private companies. What the initiative is doing here is just to show all the stakeholders including parents, families, schools, communities, health care, industry, media, and government a right direction to solve the problem and let them get involved it with their own initiatives.

Nutrition is important to understand because it is a significant contributor to the health and wellness of a human being. Nutrition can determine the weight of a person, the performance of organs and the body’s ability to prevent or accelerate certain diseases. Health and nutrition can be influenced by several factors such as family, friends, peers as well as physical and mental stress. As a young child, the immediate family is the biggest influence on nutrition because they are the first role models and establish the initial habits that the individual will develop. Through daily meal plans given to children, they can develop a standard of care in regard to nutrition and then incorporate key food groups into their daily diet. A child’s

Healthy People 2020 discusses a number of special population’s that have barriers to care including; race, age sex, sexual identity, age, disability, socioeconomic, and location; this post will discuss race (ethnic) group.  There are a number of races mentioned in healthy people 2020, such as, Asian, American Indian, Alaskan, Latino and African American (Healthy People 2020, n.d.). Access to health care in an ethnic group is multifaceted from the lack of trust, lack of health care education, discrimination and cost of care including health insurance. According to Howard, Peace, & Howard (2014), African Americans have a greater risk of three preventable diseases, hypertension, renal failure and bacterial infections stating; “no other disease

Both Healthy Alaskans 2020 and Healthy People 2020 have similar goals: increase the number of people who exercise everyday or weak. The starting point, the first action, is always educating the public or school so that people will understand that exercise is something that will prevent obesity and will greatly improve people’s health, which could also affect the length of a person’s lifespan. Along the starting point, assistance from other organizations and programs are needed in order to carry out the action. Moreover, depending on who the audience is, there will be different ways of educating them. For example, a way to teach students would be to have presenters and more exciting activities that will make students want to participate. Another example is to provide easy access to the public so that more and more people will consider exercising. Small events such as sports competitions will also entice the people. Though the goals are the same, the strategies and plans on how the goal is met

This national initiative was put in place in 2010 by efforts of First Lady, Michelle Obama. The main goal of the initiative is to combat the childhood obesity epidemic. The program has put in place multiple action plans, in the hopes of putting kids in the path to a healthy lifestyle. The campaign has also included parents and schools to be a part of these programs. They are key places and people that allow for child development and decision making. Although this is a national campaign, strategies are being implemented within small communities across the nation. Some of the interventions that can be found are: Let’s Move! Active Schools, Let’s Move! Cities, Towns and Countries, Let’s Move! salad bars to schools, Let’s Move! Childcare and Let’s Move! Outside. The campaign has had many accomplishments since its establishment. One of these is the President Challenge Youth Fitness Test, which is expected to be in 90% of schools by 2018. According to Let’s Move!, “The new Presidential Youth Fitness Program is a voluntary, school-based program that assesses students’ fitness-based health and helps them progress over time”(Let’s Move!, 2015). The Let’s Move! national campaign is still ongoing and no formal evaluation has been done, but success can be measured through the implementation of the accomplishments and policies that have accompanied the campaign. One policy is the Healthy, Hungry-free Kids Act of 2010, that touches upon changing nutritional guidelines in school lunches and other food

In light of the concerns for the future of health in the United States, there have been movements, which in turn ignited sparks to jumpstart campaigns to fight against junk food and obesity. Michelle Obama, the First Lady of the United States, kickstarted a campaign called “Let’s Move” which is dedicated to help solve and reverse the rising childhood obesity rates (Learnthefacts). This movement is all about preserving the health for the future generations. The main goals for this movement is to give parents helpful information and fostering environments that support healthy choices, provide healthier food choices in schools, and to make sure healthy food alternatives are affordable for any family(Learnthefacts). In my junior year of high school,

“Let’s move!” was a public health campaign, created by Michelle Obama, former First Lady of the United States in 2010. Let’s Move aims to decrease the rate of childhood obesity to 5% by 2030. The purpose of the health campaign was to raise public awareness about the problem of childhood obesity and creating a better lifestyle for children. Five main goals of the campaign are creating a healthy start for children, Empowering parents and caregivers, providing healthy food in schools, improving access to healthy, affordable foods, and increasing physical activity. The Let’s Move! initiative has also created various programs across the nation with federal agencies, private businesses, and nonprofit organization to help kids and families.

All over the United States healthy life styles have been promoted more and more each year. As recently as the early 2010 the First Lady, Michelle Obama launched a “Let’s Move” campaign in attempt to get America’s people up and active. This campaign has impacted the lives of many Americans of all ages and sizes. The campaign emphasizes the benefits of being active and making your heart healthy. Since the campaign, American companies and public areas have been promoting exercise and healthy living. In all public schools a child nutrition act has been placed which incorporates low-fat dairy products, vegetables and whole grains. All unhealthy vending machines have been removed and replaced with new ones that contain infused water, baked goods, grains and natural foods. These movements have been very beneficial to make people become more active and aware of their

* Identifies and examines why individuals give different meanings to health * Explains how a range of health behaviors affect an individual’s health * Describes how an individual’s health is determined by a range of factors * Evaluates aspects of health over which individuals can exert some control * Describes factors that contribute to effective health promotion * Proposes actions that can improve and maintain an individual’s health * Forms opinions about health-promoting actions based on a critical examination of relevant information * Uses a range of sources to draw conclusions about health and physical activity concepts

In this study, the authors sought to examine the impact of certain gut microbes on body composition and metabolism. It has been previously reported that the microbial community composition is more similar between related individuals. Thus, the authors of this study used both monozygotic and dizygotic twin pairs that were “discordant” for obesity in that one of them was classified as obese while the other one was not, as a model for studying the correlation between gut microbiota and obesity and associated disorders. To do this, human fecal`microbes from each member of one of four discordant twin pairs was transplanted into mice that were germ-free. The authors also investigated which microbial taxa were more invasive, as well as the relationship between the phenotype of the host and invasiveness. They also examined how a human diet can impact on invasion and microbial niche. In order to examine this, mice that were coprophagic, meaning they consume fecal matter, were housed together.

On individual level changes in health promotion and ecological approaches target and influence multiple health behaviors. This is because the individuals living in the environment are embedded in temporary change of behaviors. Therefore it is very important to consider ecological approaches, changing health behaviors and environmental factors while designing operational and supportable health promotion plans.

Further research is necessary to better understand the exact relationship of the gut bacteria and the gut itself. This will help in determining the influence of the gut bacteria on our weight [27].

Prior to reading the article “Creating a Culture of Healthy Living”, I had expected to learn about the different aspects of how communities maintained healthy living environments, and how cultures come together within a community. Instead the article enlightened me about the fact that so many Americans die from heart diseases and strokes. However, what shocked me the most was the fact that so many people still continue to engage in life threatening activities such as smoking, which causes 443,000 U.S. citizens to die prematurely each year.

What is wellness? “Wellness is an active process of becoming aware of and making choices toward a healthy life. Wellness is also a process for change and growth” (Health Topic – What is wellness?). To have acceptable wellness you should have an equal amount of social, emotional/mental, and physical health. I, myself, believe that I have an okay wellness, I mean not like full wellness but just enough to pass I'll say. But how am I living in wellness?

This essential discuses another important topic such as Clinical Prevention and Population Health. Based on this essential an important component of baccalaureate nursing program is health promotion and disease prevention at the individual and population level. Health promotion engages and empowers individuals and communities to engage in healthy behaviors, and make changes that reduce the risk of developing chronic diseases. Nowadays, the medical science has moved and focused on health promotion and injury prevention instead of treating the actual disease. The essentials provides examples of clinical prevention interventions such as, immunizations (primary prevention), screenings (secondary prevention), and counseling or education to prevent