4 groups awarded grants to fight obesity in state

Blue and You Foundation doles out $462,000 as part of healthy-living initiative

Katrina Betancourt, president and chief executive officer of the Arkansas Coalition for Obesity Prevention, talks with Troy Wells (from left), president and CEO of Baptist Health; Curtis Barnett, CEO of Arkansas Blue Cross and Blue Shield; and Patrick O’Sullivan, executive director of the Blue and You Foundation, after Betancourt’s organization received a grant from the foundation to implement wellness programs.
Katrina Betancourt, president and chief executive officer of the Arkansas Coalition for Obesity Prevention, talks with Troy Wells (from left), president and CEO of Baptist Health; Curtis Barnett, CEO of Arkansas Blue Cross and Blue Shield; and Patrick O’Sullivan, executive director of the Blue and You Foundation, after Betancourt’s organization received a grant from the foundation to implement wellness programs.

Several grants awarded Wednesday by the Blue and You Foundation will go toward fighting a growing obesity problem in Arkansas, which was recently ranked as having the sixth-highest adult obesity rate in the nation.

photo

We’re seeing more and more young adults between the ages of 30 and 40 who are coming in with heart attacks,” Arkansas Surgeon General Greg Bledsoe said Wednesday, during the announcement of Blue and You Foundation grants to fight obesity in the state.

As part of a 10-year initiative by Healthy Active Arkansas, a statewide partnership focusing on promoting healthy lifestyles, Arkansas Blue Cross and Blue Shield's Blue and You Foundation awarded $462,000 to four organizations angling to address obesity issues across the state.

Grantees are the Arkansas Coalition for Obesity Prevention, the Arkansas Department of Health, the Arkansas Hunger Relief Alliance and the University of Arkansas Foundation. Grants were awarded to fund yearlong programs that will "make some measurable impact" on health, said Patrick O'Sullivan, executive director of the foundation.

"We're seeing more and more young adults between the ages of 30 and 40 who are coming in with heart attacks, whereas 15 to 20 years ago ... that was almost unheard of. You would have to be over 40 before you started really seeing the effects," Arkansas Surgeon General Greg Bledsoe said at an event announcing the grants Wednesday.

In addition, medical practitioners have measured an increase in the number of cases of diabetes, heart disease and "all these other problems. At the root of that is obesity," Bledsoe said.

According to a report released last week by the Arkansas Center for Health Improvement, health plans covering public school and state employees in 2015 spent an average of about 31 percent more on obese patients than on others -- an average of $4,302 on patients whose height and weight ratios indicated obesity, compared with $3,270 on slimmer patients.

The report also indicated that more than a third of all adult Arkansans were considered obese, a percentage that ranked No. 6 out of the 50 states and the District of Columbia.

The Arkansas Coalition for Obesity Prevention, backed by the Arkansas Community Foundation, received the largest sum, $150,000, for their Growing Healthy Worksites program. Their efforts are aimed at helping worksites establish policies that create healthy eating options.

With the grant dollars, the coalition will hold events across the state to spread awareness of possible improvements that companies, hospitals, organizations or schools can make to encourage healthier eating.

Coalition President Katrina Betancourt said the first such event, held in Hope, attracted about 300 participants.

The Arkansas Center for Health Improvement received $136,449 to go toward studying ways that effective community-focused programs can be duplicated around the state. The center plans to conduct case studies that will look into how mobile "vegetable buses" can take farmers market produce to underserved communities, and how to carry out efforts in schools to get kids to be more physically active.

"So if another community wanted to make that happen, the steps would be documented and the cost would be known," said Joe Thompson, president and chief executive officer of the Arkansas Center for Health Improvement.

"Over the last 20 years the whole nation has had an explosion of the obesity epidemic, so we're not alone," Thompson said. "Southern states in particular have a higher level of risk for a few reasons: One is we have more poverty, and obesity tracks with poverty. ... Also we have lost some of the physical activity [once required] by the agrarian lifestyle we had."

The number of Arkansans diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes has risen from 6 percent 20 years ago to between 10 percent and 12 percent today, and that increase is showing no sign of slowing, Thompson said. It is part of Healthy Active Arkansas' 10-year strategic plan to reverse that trend.

Other grants for programs involved in the Healthy Active Arkansas initiative were $87,000 to the Arkansas Department of Health to improve health data collection and $88,682 to the Arkansas Hunger Relief Alliance, which will go toward healthy cooking and shopping classes, as well as farmers market programs across the state.

"I think it doesn't matter what we do on the [Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act], whether we repeal or replace or how we finance it. If we don't control this [obesity] epidemic and the disease conditions that are caused by it, we won't be able to afford whatever it takes in the health care system," Thompson said.

Metro on 02/23/2017

Upcoming Events