Childhood obesity is growing at an alarming rate, currently affecting one in three of the nation’s students. Unfortunately, this epidemic is disproportionately high among Hispanics, bumping the rate of obesity to nearly two out of three children in certain student populations.

As reported by KVUE News Washington Bureau, First Lady Michelle Obama has launched her “Let’s Move” campaign in an effort to help schools fight this epidemic. Keeping the high rates of childhood obesity amongst Latinos in mind, the campaign’s first meeting focused on culturally-specific solutions for this community.

With staple foods in the Latino diet that may not math up with that of Westerners, the task force acknowledged the value in culturally-attuning their dietary recommendations. One solution, as put forth by Ian Smith, founder of The 50 Million Pound Challenge, was to make a culturally relevant food pyramid using items that commonly exist in many Hispanic cultures.

Another example, as showcased by our parent company, viaLanguage, involves producing culturally resonant health program materials as they did for the Health Plan of San Mateo. By adapting the program’s word-find puzzles and children’s melodies like “Baa, Baa Black Sheep” and “Mary Had a Little Lamb,” the end product was made much more culturally meaningful. Click here to read the entire case study.

Changing any child’s diet is not an easy task, but by incorporating culturally familiar foods, activities and lessons, your efforts will hold a lot more weight in helping the Latino youth maintain theirs.

Keep learning and stay healthy!
Leslie
K12Translate

Tags: Cultural Sensitivity, Hispanic, Latino

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 21st, 2010 at 4:28 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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