The Obama administration?s Affordable Care Act has allowed local governments across the country to focus on healthy living initiatives for their communities.? The law created the $10 billion Prevention and Public Health Fund to invest in community prevention.? A broad national effort has been set in motion to nudge our health care into one that tries to prevent illness and disease from occurring in the first place.
Preventable disease is the single largest cause of death in the United States.? Unhealthy behaviors, such as poor diet and smoking, account for 40% of premature deaths.? Poor health care and limited access to the health care system account for another 10% of deaths in the country.
Very few published studies on obesity interventions have produced results, and only when participants were intensively engaged, but some public health experts say that the things being tried under the law could help bring a cultural shift in the ways Americans eat and exercise.? These experts say that only a mixture of approaches has a chance of eventually reducing rates of obesity.? Bruce Link, a professor of epidemiology and sociology at the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University, said, ?Over time all of this effort builds up so people come to think about the problem and their own behavior in a different way.?
One community is focusing on signing people up for a program to prevent heart disease.? This healthy heart program offers free medicine and checkups in exchange for taking a health class.? Health workers identify the highest-risk patients in the area, connect them with doctors, and follow up with them after checkups.? Other communities are being transformed with bike lanes and walking paths, and in other communities, the money is being used to hire a physical education coordinator for the city?s schools
Efforts to influence behavior will have only a modest effect without policy measures to change the food environment, like taxes on soda and restrictions on marketing to children, say critics.? Some public health experts say that no real progress on obesity is possible unless governments regulate junk food.? Kelly Brownell, director of the Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity at Yale University, said, ?You have to change the drivers, rather than count on people to resist them.?
Source: http://www.healthaim.com/healthy-living-initiatives-flourish-in-local-communities/
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