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School nutritionists promote healthy diets
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To encourage healthy eating habits all year, take your children grocery-shopping with you and involve the whole family in food preparation. - photo by Stock photo

National Nutrition Month — March — is almost over, but with weight struggles and obesity reaching epidemic levels in Georgia and nationally, it’s not too late to start children on healthy eating habits to last year round, according to the Georgia Association of School Nurses.
Making healthy eating choices and maintaining a healthy weight reduces a child’s chance of developing many chronic conditions both now and later in life, including type 2 diabetes, heart disease and stroke, cancer, high blood pressure, gallbladder disease, osteoarthritis, gout, breathing problems and asthma.
“Even if your child is not overweight now, poor nutrition and lack of physical activity can add up to problems later, but a strong foundation to make smart, healthy choices begun at a young age can last a lifetime,” said GASN President Carol Darsey, who also is the Liberty County School System’s lead nurse.
Here are 10 healthy habits that are easy, and — with the right, fun food choices — children will find them delicious, too:
• Fill half your child’s plate with fruit and vegetables.
• Don’t keep sugar-sweetened beverages at home, or limit to special treats.
• Serve breakfast every day. Skipping breakfast is one of the top risk factors for type 2 diabetes. (For extra protection against diabetes, serve a bowl of high-fiber cereal with a banana or raisins.)
• Limit your child’s meals outside the home and fast food to no more than once a week.
• Sit down as a family and eat together without distractions.
• Take your children grocery-shopping with you and involve them in food preparation.
• Pack lunchboxes and brown bags with sandwiches that contain turkey and other healthy cold cuts, instead of processed meats, such as bologna.
• Ensure your child gets one hour or more of daily physical activity, and don’t let him/her spend more than one hour a day sitting in front of a television or computer screen.
• Plant a vegetable garden together.
• Most important of all: Guide your child gently toward healthy food choices, rather than dictating. Make healthy snack foods available in your home and look for healthy choices that children like.
For more information on the roles that school nurses play in nutrition education, planning special meals for children with health conditions and caring for children with diabetes and other chronic diseases, go to www.gasn.org.

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From the book 'Outliers' comes proof that good health is more than just genetics
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Friends Jim Young, left, Mike Natale, Jeff Natale and Ryan Kiernan were on Greenwich High School football team together and Jim and Mike were captains. Jim, who was the youngest in Sherry Young's family, was welcome in the homes of the other three boys who still had siblings around and grandparents near. - photo by Sherry Young
As I look back on my life and the lives of others, both personally and in the reading I have done, I am convinced of the necessity of positive human contact in our lives. We are doubly blessed when we are able to make good friends or are a part of a family where we are accepted and loved.

Malcolm Gladwell in his book Outliers tells of a time in the 1950s when Dr. Stewart Wolf met a physician who practiced in the area of Roseto, Pennsylvania. Roseto was settled by a group of Italian families from Roseto, Italy, who re-created their life again in America.

This was in the 1950s before drugs and measures to prevent heart disease became important. In their conversation the physician said, You know, Ive been practicing for 17 years. I get patients from all over, and I rarely find anyone from Roseto under the age of 65 with heart disease.

Wolf was surprised by these words as, It was impossible to be a doctor, common sense said, and not see heart disease.

Wolf enlisted the aid of a sociologist and friend John Bruhn to help him. They found, There was no suicide, no alcoholism, no drug addiction, and very little crime. They didnt have anyone on welfare. Then we looked at peptic ulcers. They didnt have any of those either. These people were dying of old age. Thats it.

They checked into diet, genetics and possibilities of something in the foothills of eastern Pennsylvania but nothing made sense.

What they found was that Rosetans visited one another, stopping to chat in Italian on the street, say, or cooking for one another in their backyards. (Researchers) learned about the extended family clans that underlay the towns social structure. They saw how many homes had three generations living under one roof and how much respect grandparents commanded. They went to Mass at Our Lady of Mount Carmel and saw the unifying and calming effect of the church. They counted 22 separate civic organizations in a town of just under 2,000 people. They picked up on the particular egalitarian ethos of the community, which discouraged the wealthy from flaunting their success and helped the unsuccessful obscure their failures.

What they found eventually convinced the medical establishment to look beyond the individual and understand the culture people are part of their friends, families and town they came from. They determined that the people we surround ourselves with and the values of the world we inhabit have a profound effect on who we are.

Likely, this study could have been done with other ethnicities. However, my family's experiences with the Italian families in Connecticut ring true to the study. Our hungry and growing sons, especially our youngest son, Jim, who was left home alone with two beady-eyed parents, all had some memorable experiences being fed and loved in the Cos Cob multigenerational families. Proof of the African proverb, It takes a village to raise a child.

We live in an age when the contact we have with people often is on the internet, and many of us live among strangers. Unless we make the effort to reach out, we will become isolated, especially as we age. The Rosetan study is proof that reaching out and communicating may be good for our health.
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