Photo by Staffs Live/FlickrCC
By Greg Stotelmyer/Public News Service Kentucky
As tens of thousands of Kentucky families pick up their food boxes this month from hundreds of food pantries across the state, they will find more than something to eat inside. An educational flyer with a simple message, eat healthy and get moving, has been added. The idea is to help an at-risk population curb a deadly problem.
Stewart Perry, Advocacy Director with the Bluegrass American Diabetes Association, said there’s been a staggering increase in the disease in recent years.
“We can point fingers,” he said. “We can say inactivity. We can say obesity. But, it’s a real domino effect of getting people to understand the problem, to getting people to address the problem and getting the communities to own that problem and make it a priority.”
The CDC found that diabetes more than tripled in Kentucky from 1995 to 2010. Perry said working with the state’s food pantries during American Diabetes Month is a natural fit because lower-income people often are at highest risk for long-term health problems. According to the Kentucky Association of Food Banks, 41 percent of households served have at least one family member with diabetes.
Passport Health Plan, a nonprofit provider which administers Medicaid benefits to nearly 300,000 Kentuckians, also is a partner in the project…
The fundamental issue here is that what we have come to regard as staple foods have changed.
Also, that the most frugal choices are typically the worst from a perspective of satiety, obesity and disease.
The inexpensive, heavily subsidized, highly-processed carbohydrates that now dominate the Appalachian diet are designed for overconsumption. The result is obesity and metabolic disease.
Not until we can be honest enough to address the core issue and admit that the average diet is dangerous and educate about it in the same way we have with tobacco awareness, will much progress be made.
I applaud any efforts towards education that empowers individuals to create healthy meals from basic, unprocessed ingredients. And also any efforts to bring those ingredients to frugal consumers in economically blasted regions like Appalachia.