Food marketing to children and teens is a major public health concern. Earlier this year, the Walt Disney Company announced it will no longer accept advertisements for junk food on its child-directed television, radio, and online sites. Disney also updated its nutrition standards for foods that can be advertised to children. The food and beverage [...]
Arizona is way over the limit - almost 2/3rds of us are overweight or obese. A report released last week shows that the cost to all of us is $190 billion every year. There's a great opportunity happening right now with a national push to fight the obesity problem. The CDC, along with HBO, The Institutes of [...]
Our Bureau of Women's and Children's Health team released the Arizona Women's Health Status Report recently. The report details how Arizona women are doing toward achieving optimal health and wellness. Topics covered in the report include physical activity, oral health, mental health, access to care and general wellness. The good news is that 83% of [...]
Making good decisions about prioritizing which public health issues to tackle and how to target our interventions rests on our ability to collect and analyze public health data. For infectious disease surveillance that means have a base of solid reporting and surveillance so we can analyze infectious disease trends. For chronic diseases, we need to [...]
This month AHCCCS told us that they’ve picked our Bureau of Tobacco & Chronic Disease as the state applicant for HHS’ Medicaid Incentives for Prevention of Chronic Diseases Grant. The grant proposal (which will be developed with AHCCCS) must be turned in to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services early next month. The grant [...]
You probably think I sound like a broken record because I’m always writing about obesity… but it really is the dominant public health issue of our time. Last week, the CDC released its latest Vital Signs report called "State-Specific Obesity Prevalence Among Adults – United States, 2009,"… which finds that nine states had an obesity [...]
The Trust for America’s Health released their annual obesity report. Overall, the national trend toward increasing obesity rates continued it’s march forward. Arizona ranked in the middle of the pack, but the pack itself in increasingly unhealthy. More than two-thirds of states have adult obesity rates above 25 percent. In 1991, no state had an [...]
The US obesity epidemic is costing Americans more and more each year. It’s not just the decreased quality of life that it causes, but it causes a whole host of downstream problems like diabetes and circulatory problems. Type 2 diabetes had been a disease of folks over 40 that became seriously overweight over time- but [...]
