Healthy Eating, Active Communities

Healthy Eating, Active Communities (HEAC) works to prevent childhood obesity by changing the environments children inhabit, so that these environments encourage healthy choices. HEAC focuses on improving policies and institutional practices in order to ensure lasting change. And to ensure changes that work on the ground, HEAC pursues these goals through fostering partnerships within local communities, and through linking the local work to statewide and national efforts. The majority of efforts to reduce childhood obesity and the other consequences of poor nutrition and inactivity still center on getting kids -- or their parents -- to make better choices. Yet families often inhabit an environment that makes healthy choices extremeley difficult. HEAC strives to change the school and community environments in order to faciliate change and encourage healthy choices. The program strives to achieve change across five specific sectors: schools, after school programs, neighborhoods, food and beverage media and advertising, and health care.

Healthy Eating, Active Communities (HEAC) aims to fight the growing childhood obesity epidemic in California and to develop state policy changes that will reduce the risk factors for diabetes and obesity.

The Healthy Eating, Active Communities (HEAC) aims to establish the evidence base for the importance of emphasizing environmental change in all efforts to reduce childhood obesity. Their four-year program is producing a plethora of reports and policy briefs to inform decision makers about evidence-based strategies and model policies and programs for improving health and creating sustained change and improvement. The work of Samuels and Associates the administrator of HEAC has resulted in legislation, policy changes and programs that have reshaped the environment, creating opportunities for healthier choices. The Samuels and Associates four-year report of HEAC showed that HEAC sites have made significant improvements in the healthfulness of the school environment. Sites have adopted school wellness policies and have implemented a range of state and local school district policies that have improved the healthfulness of competitive foods and beverages sold and have enhanced the quality of
physical education (PE) on campus. In addition, HEAC has successfully implemented after school programs and neighborhood activities.