Childhood obesity isn’t an issue that strikes only when adolescents explore their independence and start making their own food and lifestyle choices, it unfortunately also strikes children at a much younger age. According to the recent study “Prevalence of Obesity Among US Preschool Children in Different Racial and Ethic Groups” (Arch Pediatr Adolesc Me 2009; 163(4):344-348), the obesity prevalence of 4-year old children in the United States is a disturbing 18.4% (95% confidence interval [CI], 17.1%-19.8%), with the ethic/racial breakdowns as follows:

American Indian/Native Alaskan, 31.2% (95% CI, 24.6%-37.8%); Hispanic, 22.0% (95% CI, 19.5%-24.5%); non-Hispanic black, 20.8% (95% CI, 17.8%-23.7%); non-Hispanic white, 15.9% (95% CI, 14.3%-17.5%); and Asian, 12.8% (95% CI, 10.0%-15.6%)

Childhood obesity can lead to a myriad of physical and psychological health problems, among them diabetes, high blood pressure, heart disease, low self esteem, harassment and discrimination.

Ideally parents should lead the charge in reversing this disturbing trend of obesity in children, but sometimes themselves contribute to the problem due to ignorance or their own poor health practices. Fortunately there are number of concerted efforts being made to combat childhood obesity. A select list of programs/organizations includes:

Alliance for a Healthier Generation

The Alliance for a Healthier Generation is a partnership between the American Heart Association and the William J. Clinton Foundation.

It seeks to make a positive impact on children’s health via its four core initiatives — Healthy Schools Program, Industry Program (encouraging restaurants and snack companies to create healthier meals, snacks and drinks for children), Kids’ Movement, and Healthcare Program.

NUTRITION DETECTIVES® “Teaching Kids to Make Healthy Choices”

Nutrition Detectives in a nutrition education program for elementary school children where youngsters learn how to read food labels, how to identify healthy foods, and how to make wise nutritional choices.

It includes a manual/curriculum guide for teachers and a pre- and post food label quiz to measure students’ increased nutritional comprehension.

Food Dudes

The Food Dudes Healthy Eating Programme, which originated in the UK and is available in six languages, is geared towards children 2-11.

It claims a high success rate in getting participating children to eat more fruits and vegetables, with equal effectiveness for boys and girls and children of all socioeconomic backgrounds. The site provides a step-by-step guide to starting a Food Dudes program.

"More Kiwi" from Matt Linehan

“I have long believed that prevention and wellness are the keys to solving our health-care crisis. We must recreate America as a “wellness society” focused on fitness, good nutrition and disease prevention—ultimately, keeping people out of the hospital in the first place. You paved the way for a lot of people, and this is something I have been laboring on for a long time.  We don’t have a health-care system in America; we have a “sick care” system. The problem is that this current system is all about patching things up after the fact.” – recent statement by Sen. Tom Harkin

Fortunately, the importance of preventive health care is gaining traction among the medical community, government and business leaders, and the public at large. Increasingly more people are educating themselves about how to lead healthy lives, and are doing so at a time when there is an immense amount of legitimate and free information about health and illness prevention available online.

Nutritional know-how is a vital component of illness and disease prevention, and these days consumers have an unprecedented opportunity to take their nutritional health into their own hands and develop true nutritional intelligence. Learning the basics, let’s call it Nutrition 101, is a good starting point, and that means knowing what carbohydrates, fats and proteins, vitamins and dietary minerals are, and how they impact and interact within the human body. Making wise choices regarding what foods to eat is another important component of nutritional intelligence. But although most consumers know that there are healthier and less healthy foods to chose from, and are becoming literate in reading food labels, comparing one food item against another can seem daunting.

While not a substitute for trying to keep up with the latest studies and findings in the nutrition field, comparing foods will likely become easier with the newly-launched NuVal Nutritional Scoring System. Although there are several other food labeling systems in place (for a good historical overview of American food and nutrition labeling, see Fooducate’s post), NuVal™ gets points for being easy to use – with a scoring system of 1 to 100 (100 being the highest), consumers can now compare items both within and across categories.

The scoring system takes into account more than 30 different nutrients and nutrition factors.  Nutrients with generally favorable effects are placed in the numerator (fiber, folate, Vitamin A, Vitamin C, Vitamin D, Vitamin E, Vitamin B12, Vitamin B6, potassium, calcium, zinc, omega-3 fatty acids, total bioflavanoids, total carotenoids, magnesium and iron), while nutrients with generally unfavorable effects on health are placed in the denominator (saturated fat, trans fat, sodium, sugar and cholesterol). Another positive aspect of NuVal™ is that, while its goal is to provide a nutritional score for every one of the more than 50,000 products found in the average grocery store, its Overall Nutritional Quality Index (ONQI™) algorithm underlying the scoring system was created independent of manufacturers and other similarly interested parties.

Standing on the 86th Floor Observatory at 1,050 feet, the view of Manhattan and beyond is a breathtaking sight.

Along with Jake McKee, I was one of the official conference bloggers. Being a designated blogger is a very different experience that being a regular attendee or even a speaker, and having now worked in that capacity, I have a much deeper respect for what goes into such a seemingly easy task. Aside from the typical challenges of racing from one session to the next, making sure your computer battery doesn’t run out of juice when there is no available plug, being flexible with program and panelist changes, and writing without the luxury of reviewing and editing what you’ve written, there is the responsibility of trying to record the highlights of the covered sessions in such a way that readers are able to get value from what you’ve posted.

Without questions, for me one of the highlights of the conference were the research and measurement sessions. Not necessarily because they were the most entertaining (I’d put the lunch keynote by Richard Tait, Grand Poo Bah of Cranium Inc., the keynote by Andy Sernovitz, author of Word of Mouth Marketing: How Smart Companies Get People Talking or the session “No Fans, No Band” in that category), but because they provided the oh-so-important hard data validating the effectiveness of word of mouth.

Between the Research Symposium and the Summit, there were over twenty sessions on research and measurement. Additionally, attendees received the excellent Measuring Word of Mouth: Current Thinking on Research and Measurement of Word of Mouth Marketing, WOMMA’s third annual research volume (available for purchase as well) that contains over twenty papers covering a wide range of topics with a particular emphasis on the influencer model.

What’s also useful within the research volume is the section on WOMMA terminology, which aims to “provide a unified framework for describing and measuring word of mouth marketing.” It provides definitions of word of mouth (”the act of a consumer creating and/or distributing marketing-relevant information to another consumer”), work of mouth marketing (”en effort by an organization to affect how consumers create and/or distribute marketing-relevant information to other consumers”) and WOM Episode (”a single occurrence of word of mouth communication, which includes Participants, Actions, WOMUnits, Venues, and Outcomes”), among other things. There is also an excellent visual summary of what happens during a WOM Episode, along with the associated qualities thereof — namely a participant taking an action on a WOMUnit in a particular venue that then results in an outcome.

What’s particularly interesting, though, is social media’s broader ability to quickly share and disseminate critical information when things go wrong, wrong as in threatening, dangerous, and frequently life-altering, which we’re seeing right now with the California wildfires. CenterNetworks points to some of the recent coverage of the fires on sites such as Flickr (see the search term “california fires” for recent images), YouTube ( see the 2000+ results for “california fires”) and Wikipedia (see “California Wildfires of October 2007″) among others. CNET reports how microblogging site Twitter is being used by news organizations such as KPBS and L.A. Times and individuals Nate Ritter to give updates. And Ustream.tv is showing live coverage of the fires.

Meanwhile, on-the-ball international organizations such as the American Red Cross are using social media tools to help serve as vital and up-to-date information sources — see the  Online Disaster News Portal, as well as the Red Cross and the Safe and Well Twitter accounts.

My prediction is that within a relatively short time frame, say perhaps three years, the majority of disaster relief organizations, both government and private, will fully implement real-time information dissemination  via text messaging, microblogging and an assortment of additional tools and social networking sites.

“We Must Scrupulously Guard the Civil Rights and Civil Liberties of All Citizens…” Franklin Roosevelt Memorial, Washington D.C., United States

Today is Blog Action Day, where thousands of bloggers — over fifteen thousand and counting, with millions of combined readers — write about a single important topic: the environment.

Well, "protecting the environment" has been a buzz phrase for a very long time now, and just as there are many people and organizations who understand that environmental protection isn’t antithetical to business and can go hand-in-hand with it, there unfortunately are detractors who are more comfortable being cynics than taking steps that, on a combined scale, will make positive long-term change. Fortunately, important events such as Al Gore’s winning of the Nobel Peace Prize along with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, lend great credibility to the importance of environmental causes and place them on the global stage.

Ultimately every action starts with an idea, though. And so, I’d like to share, in his own words, what a very special young boy, with the wide-eyed innocence of youth, suggested we can all do to "help the earth." 

• Watering your lawn and watering your garden.
• Feeding wild birds in the winter.
• Cleaning up your toys.
• Picking up garbage outside.
• Don’t burn tires, or don’t use your car too much since that can pollute the air.
• Keeping the lakes and rivers and oceans clean.

If a six-year old can come up with ideas and get excited about how he can contribute, surely the rest of us can too. 

The first thing I noticed were pictures of a little girl who looked like she was only a few years old. The second thing I saw was the Twitter bio, "has been abducted in Plaia da Luz, Portugal." I made "Madeleine" my friend and read her website where I learned that, as of today, she’s been missing 116 days after being stolen from her bed.

In learning more about Madeleine’s case and wondering what I would do to help find my child if he or she were missing, I saw the impressive efforts to keep attention and help collect information about the abduction –  the Bring Madeleine Home website, the Twitter site, a Live Spaces page, a MySpace page, many YouTube videos (as well as the YouTube channel Don’t You Forget About Me that aims to reunite children with their families), the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre’s Help Find Madeleine McCann page, electronic posters in multiple languages and desktop wallpapers, as well as an online store that helps raise funds to assist in her search.

While Madeleine’s father, Gerry McCann, implied that he is concerned about the case becoming too sensationalistic and may return home to the U.K. with the rest of his family, one hopes that the strong online attention will soon help lead to a break in the case.

Tags: social media, children,  law, abduction