On any given weekend, dozens of children fill fields in the Northwest section of Santa Maria, playing soccer and casual games of football until darkness descends. Further south, in a dirt lot in the Newlove area, teams of young men engage in a game of pelota mixteca, a traditional Mixtec sport similar to tennis.
In these two neighborhoods, where 61 percent of the population lives in poverty and 53 percent of adults are overweight, the sights are encouraging to Santa Barbara County’s Public Health Department. The neighborhoods are a main focus of the agency’s Communities of Excellence in Nutrition, Physical Activity and Obesity (CX3) program, and Marian Medical Center, in a combined effort to curb child obesity among the county’s poor.
According to Sandy Underwood, Marian Medical Center’s Senior Community Benefit Coordinator, childhood obesity is increasingly a scourge in low-income areas of Santa Maria, where the cheapest food is likely the highest in calories, the most fattening, and the least nutritious.
For the past four years, Marian has offered a “Healthy for Life” lecture series in the Newlove and the Northwest neighborhoods, espousing the values of label reading, food pyramids, portion size, and eating a variety of vegetables. The program also advocates for carrying more fresh fruits and vegetables in local corner stores, and addresses the issue of street vendors who allow children easy access to snacks and junk food.
In conjunction with the program, Fidel Villanueva of Communities in Excellence began holding regular nutrition classes in the two areas in 2010, cooking and tasting recipes with local residents while taking into account their culture, staple foods, and beliefs about obesity.
“A lot of the families aren’t aware that the kids, when they become heavy, that they’re becoming unhealthy,” Villanueva said. “There are some people who believe that the heavier you are, the healthier you are, and that isn’t true. It has to be a very gentle process of reeducating the parents.”
After learning about healthy food, parents requested to engage in physical activity that, unlike the gym, didn’t cost money. The county recommended group walks, but met some resistance.
“They said it’s very dangerous for us to walk around here in our communities,” Villanueva said. “We go to the Minami [Center] area and if we go there too late, it’s not that safe. If we go to the store, we have to cross streets, and we don’t feel comfortable doing that with our kids.”
Out of those concerns, Villanueva created a weekly walking club, which began at the Minami Center. Walkers were concerned about the proximity to busy streets and a lack of crosswalks, so the group moved to the track at Allan Hancock College. Through advertising the group in the nutrition class, soon an average of eight families walked together for an hour every Tuesday evening.
“After a couple of months of doing these walks, people started noticing that they were losing weight and their health was getting better,” Villanueva said. “It doesn’t take that much.”
Villanueva noted the case of one female walker, who after three months in the program told the group she’d dropped her cholesterol level by 10 points and lost 15 pounds.
The walking club is on hiatus until the spring, but the nutritional meetings will continue teaching parents to become educators and health advocates in their community and schools.
Starting healthy habits in school is vitally important, according to Susan Horne, coordinator of the county’s Partners For Fit Youth program, because children who live sedentary lifestyles tend to continue that pattern into adulthood.
A coalition of health advocates created Partners for Fit Youth in 2001 as a response to alarm about childhood obesity rates. The group’s mission was to get low-income families to eat healthy and get plenty of physical fitness.
“People were kind of panicking about the rates of obesity among children,” Horne said. “There was just so much that needed to be done, we just had to start somewhere.”
Horne said the biggest factor of childhood obesity is “screen time”—excessive hours spent watching television, using computers, or playing video games. Another is the sugar content in drinks, which Partners for Fit Youth focused on in their “Rethink Your Drink” campaign.
“The biggest goal is to make the healthy choice the easy choice, which it’s not right now,” Horne said. “We have aggressive advertising of unhealthy foods and beverages to children, and the healthy fast food choices are not the default.”
Physicians recommend children get at least one hour of physical activity each day, Horne said. However, with most school districts unable to afford credentialed physical education teachers, elementary school students get little exercise during the day.
According to the website Kidsdata, in the Santa Maria Bonita School District, only 26.5 percent of male students and 27 percent of females met all of California’s fitness standards as fifth graders in 2008.
There is cause for hope however, Horne said. Through the YMCA and Boys and Girls Clubs, more low-cost activities are available now to children than there were five years ago. Programs like the Afterschool Education & Safety Program (ASES), organized by the YMCA, Boys and Girls Club, and the schools, provides a “saving grace” of fitness time, she said.
Horne is also pushing to make neighborhoods safer so more students are able to walk to and from school. Many of the city’s tennis and basketball courts, tracks, and soccer fields don’t have lights, and poorer neighborhoods lack continuous sidewalks, she said, hampering the ability of youth to play sports and walk safely.
Compounding the problem in low-income communities, CX3’s Villanueva said, is the fact that families with multiple children of similar age can’t afford to put them all into organized sports. Most parents have to work full-time, and commonly take care of other families’ kids to supplement their income, making parental involvement in athletics difficult.
Above all else, Villanueva said, improving physical fitness in the low-income areas of Santa Maria will take consistency and cooperation.
“In these communities, if you talk to people, they acknowledge the value of physical activity,” Villanueva said. “What’s so difficult is all the boundaries … sometimes it’s just difficult to find where they can do something that’s going to be safe, and that’s going to be family friendly. That’s the trick. If we can do something family friendly, they’ll be there.”
Staff Writer Jeremy Thomas can be contacted at jthomas@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in Jan 20-27, 2011.
