Health Education Reduces Obesity

For far too many Mississippians, obesity has become a way of life. A June 2010 report issued by Trust for America’s Health, “F as in Fat: How Obesity Threatens America’s Future,” listed Mississippi as the state with the highest obesity rate in the nation – the highest among adults at 33.8 percent and youth ages 10- to 17-years old at 21.9 percent. With more than two-thirds of adults in the state considered overweight and obese (68.6 percent) and nearly one-quarter of today’s youth obese, the need for action is urgent.

Though the state has taken several steps to ensure healthy student nutrition and physical activity standards, namely the 2007 Mississippi Healthy Students Act, which, among other things, set requirements for minimum periods of physical activity-based instruction and a minimum period of health education instruction for students in grades K-8, more action is clearly needed to reverse patterns of unhealthy eating and inactive lifestyles that plague Mississippi’s communities.

HERO includes comprehensive and concrete projects and activities that engage not only the school systems to meet state standards, but also engage the community at large to become part of the solution in Mississippi’s obesity epidemic. The Partnership for a Healthy Mississippi will draw upon its proven record of changing adult and youth attitudes, beliefs and behaviors regarding tobacco use to demonstrate success in the fight for our very lives against unhealthy lifestyles and obesity.  The Partnership seeks to demonstrate the importance of a larger community and provide tangible results for changing policies and practices governing health decisions from every aspect of the community, including schools, media, faith-based, governmental, healthcare and others.