UNH Cooperative Extension has received a $215,000, three-year grant from the Healthy New Hampshire Foundation (HNHfoundation) to fund our Lighten Up New Hampshire! project, an initiative aimed at helping New Hampshire residents reach and maintain a healthy weight.

The grant will fund a comprehensive Web site of New Hampshire-specific resources and formation of a statewide Lighten Up NH! alliance of organizations and health professionals interested in reducing obesity in the Granite State.

“UNH Cooperative Extension has been reaching out to individuals, families and communities with health promotion messages and programs for 91 years,” says Charlene Baxter, who heads Extension’s Family and Consumer Resources program.

“The grant will allow us both to expand the health education work we already do that helps prevent obesity, and to connect people and programs statewide that aim at helping citizens reach and maintain a healthy weight.”


Obesity: a complex phenomenon
Obesity may soon challenge smoking as the nation's No.1 public health concern, says Colette Janson-Sand, a UNH associate professor and Extension nutrition specialist. “More than 65 percent of American adults classify themselves as overweight or obese, and the percentage of overweight children has doubled in the past 20 years - to 58 percent. The direct and indirect costs associated with obesity add up to more than $231 billion.”

“More than half the people in New Hampshire are obese or overweight, including 63 percent of food stamp recipients and about 20 percent of the state’s children,” says Janson-Sand.

“But below these alarming statistics, obesity emerges as an extremely complex problem that goes well beyond individual choices about food and exercise,” says Janson-Sand. “It involves dramatic changes in patterns of work and family life in recent decades, changes in land use and community design, competition for leisure time, jobs that require increasingly less manual labor, increasingly longer work hours. Today’s families spend half their food dollars eating out, where healthy food choices may be limited, and many Americans say their long work and commuting hours and their children’s schedules leave them no time for exercise. Many people live in neighborhoods without safe places to exercise, or in areas where they have limited access to healthful foods.”

The need: connecting New Hampshire people and programs
“We’ve had an interdisciplinary team looking at the many dimensions of the obesity issue for more than three years to find ways to expand our outreach, Baxter says. “Each of our team members knew of many first-rate local and statewide initiatives aimed at some aspect of the problem, but we realized the state lacked a program to make them visible to one another, and to connect all these people and programs in some meaningful way.

“We know the Web can serve as a powerful tool for organizing information and connecting people in interactive online communities of practice and interest, but no Web site currently collects and integrates all obesity resources specific to New Hampshire.” says Baxter.

She continues, “The site we envision will organize and integrate the best online resources in ways that individuals, parents, teachers, health professionals, and community leaders will find useful. So, community leaders might visit there to learn about approaches other communities have tried, health professionals to connect their patients with local programs, and individuals to find information and peer support. The alliance will help concerned professionals, organizations, and individuals connect with each other to share ideas, collaborate on programs, and maximize scarce resources.

“Extension works in communities throughout New Hampshire in nearly every dimension of human life. We’ve had a long history of establishing successful coalitions that bring together a wide array of people and organizations working toward a common goal,” says Baxter. “So forming the alliance seemed like a natural role for us to play in our statewide effort to tackle obesity.”

By Peg Boyles, Extension writer/editor

Current UNH Cooperative Extension health promotion outreach programs

• Changing the Scene A statewide program that recruits school nurses and school faculty to change the nutrition and fitness environment in their schools schools.
• Liveable, Walkable Communities
  Explore the vital role community design and development play in citizen health and well-being, including obesity prevention.
• Fact sheets, worksheets, newsletters and lessons A large and growing collection of useful information about improving your diet and becoming more physically active.
• 4-H Get up and Go Part of a larger statewide initiative, Walk New Hampshire (Walk NH) , 4-H Get Up and Go encourages parents and other adults to lace up their walking shoes and join their kids in a walk across New Hampshire.
• Nutrition Connections Nutrition and fitness education and support for income-eligible residents. Focuses on dietary quality, food resource management, shopping behavior, food safety, food security, and importance of physical activity.
• Matt’s story The story of how one family found help for a health problem from an Extension Nutrition Connections educator to solve individual helped nutrition outreach.
• Physical activity equipment, school breakfast programs, and school nutrition programs needs assessment Report to the HNH foundation of a statewide survey intended to help the foundation better direct grant money to elementary schools most in need.