Purpose:

During my time in High School, I created the Health Education Committee of the Alachua County March of Dimes Chain Reaction Youth Leadership Council and developed and brought a Health Education presentation aimed at empowering young people to make healthy lifestyle changes to the local middle schools.

   While working with March of Dimes organization to fight prematurity and give newborn babies a healthy start, I learned about the disturbing statistics that one out of three children in our nation is overweight or obese with a high risk of developing either heart disease or type two diabetes later in life. I wanted to see my generation thriving as healthy, creative, and productive people instead of being handicapped by various health problems. During my apprenticeship as a summer camp counselor at Sun Country Sports Center, I watched in disbelief how children of all ages were literally living on sugar, colorful selections of gummies, candy bars, cookies, and soda drinks. At the other end of this excessive sugar consumption, I observed an extremely overweight patient in the late stages of type two diabetes undergoing a toe amputation in the podiatrist office where I worked that summer. Also, while attending the pre-college STEM Academy at the University of South Florida, I learned about tremendous research efforts made to cure diabetes and wondered if the preventive measures such as healthy eating choices and physical activity would be more cost-effective and long lasting solutions to it.

    I became impassioned to take action and create an inspiring and engaging, “children to children” health education program for middle school students that would emphasize the importance of healthy eating habits and physical activity. After making the “Sugar in Our Diet” short movie, assembling the presentation, collaborating with my committee members, training the presenters, and communicating with the Alachua County School Board, the Health Education event I had envisioned took its debut in the local middle schools. It was an extremely gratifying experience to interact one on one with the students in the class rooms. Throughout the day, I watched how the students’ attitudes towards healthy lifestyle choices changed after the presentation, and they eagerly requested more advice. The children were genuinely concerned with the amount of sugar added to their food daily, which even included sugar added into the cups of water sold in their school cafeteria. These disheartening comments made me realize that parents as well as other adults were equally responsible for the excessive sugar in the diet of young children.

   For these reasons, I have decided to take this health education project to the next level and inspire parents to make careful choices as they form the habits and preferences of their children. The goal I would like to achieve in this coming semester would be to bring these new similar presentations to the hospital where they can be shown to expecting mothers as an important message of the dangers of addicting your children to sugar. I feel that this would be a very important step towards the overall goal of a more healthier generation since the path to healthiness begins with the parents’s choices, and they should be aware that after a certain age when children’s brains and taste buds have matured, reversing the “sugar addiction” becomes nearly impossible. I belive that educating parents on the importance of controlling the amount of sugar especially artifical that children consume will help prevent their addiction and subsequent diseases such as Diabetes because no parent would want for their child to have Diabetes. I hope that this project could become implemented in more hospitals’ matirnity wards or in pediatic offices as an way to educate parents on the importance of living a healthy lifestlye and how it will not only benefit them but the whole community by slowly fighting this epidemic of obesity. I hope that my efforts in the health education programs will encourage young people and their parents to make long lasting and postive changes in their lives.