As we finish our section on obesity, I alert you to this terrific article in Food Technology magazine from 2022. It describes the personal journey of Dr. Sara Bleich, a professor of Professor of Public Health Policy at Harvard and the former Director of Nutrition Security and Health Equity at the USDA.
In this article, Dr. Bleich discusses many of the same issues we talked about – childhood obesity, the role of communities, and how obesity affects certain populations more than others. She also touches on one of themes of this unit – how the food industry can partner with the USDA and public health agencies to improve the food supply.
She also used the same example as I did in class about the calorie equivalents between a bottle of pop and 5 miles of walking.
What is especially inspiring about this article, however, is that while Dr. Bleich may have earned degrees from Harvard and Columbia, when she was a child, her family received SNAP and WIC assistance.
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