A Nurse Practitioner's View

Today, the University of Wisconsin and Robert Wood Johnson Foundation launched www.countyhealthrankings.org , a website that examines the health of each county in the United States and ranks them accordingly. This is a wonderful resource for both patients and health providers that examines health at the local community level. Health disparities exist here in our own country. This new comprehensive database is an evidence based perspective so we can begin to address these issues. All key stakeholders must be engaged if we are going to make a difference. Where does your county rank and how will you address these disparities? (image borrowed from: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/35439793/ )

Today, Michelle Obama launched the Let's Move ! campaign to tackle childhood obesity. The goal of the program is: "to solve the epidemic of childhood obesity within a generation." We are right there with you to tackle this challenge! Speaking of obesity..... William Neuman of the New York Times takes on our antiquated and hard to interpret food labels in terms of serving sizes. Its a great video and shows what a serving size should be according to the label. Now, the FDA is considering changing the standard serving sizes and encouraging manufacturers to list calorie counts on the front of packages. It is truly mind boggling to try and interpret portion sizes and nutrition information on today's foods. Most of us under-estimate the amount of food we eat. Healthy living begins with our diet and if we cannot adequately determine the nutritional value of what we are consuming, it becomes impossible. This also ties into the recent study that showed calorie counts are f...