Capital Region Cares Capital Region Cares 2018-2019 | Page 49

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Opinion
Breaking Health Barriers
AMBER STOTT, CEO, FOOD LITERACY CENTER
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finger on the pulse of our community’s most pressing health
concerns, then funding community-level solutions. She gets
excited about the projects that she calls “upstream,” or the
ones that seek to solve health care problems before they start
by addressing social factors.
“We’re looking at an upstream, preventative perspective,
rather than just looking at what do we need right now, but
looking five to 10 years down the road,” says Kirkland. “We
have to educate externally. You see an issue and you want to
take care of it right now, but what can we address to mitigate
those issues?”
Food Literacy Center, the nonprofit where I serve as CEO,
provides this approach and is one program funded by Digni-
ty Health because it targets chronic disease at the place be-
fore it starts. Using carrots and broccoli as tools, the program
teaches cooking and nutrition to kids who are at high risk for
chronic disease due to social factors like poverty and food
insecurity — and a south Sacramento ZIP code.
Children from financially poor households are two times
more likely to be obese than children from higher income
families, and they’re more likely to grow to be adults with a
lower quality of life, including poorer health, educational at-
tainment and employment outcomes.
“Generational issues like poverty or lack of access to ed-
ucation will trickle down to youth,” cautions Kirkland. “We
don’t think about youth until later. Programs that focus on
empowering youth are important. They’re often overlooked,
and it isn’t until later in life when they’re suffering from pov-
erty or mental health that we start to think about it.”
In the case of diabetes prevention, it’s critical to reach
children at a young age to help them develop healthy habits
before chronic disease starts. It’s not enough to simply show
them how. Programs similar to the Food Literacy Center’s
also partner with the local food bank to teach kids how to ac-
cess quality produce in a food desert and how to advocate to
a school principal for healthy snacks in the classroom. When
youth are empowered today, they can work to stop social
barriers from becoming generational trends. n
id you know that your ZIP code can determine your
health? A resident of East Sacramento can expect to live
almost a decade longer than someone in south Sacra-
mento, according to the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.
Social influences compound to create communities that are
unhealthier than others. In south Sacramento, portions of
four neighborhoods are listed by the U.S. Department of Ag-
riculture as “food deserts,” meaning residents don’t have ad-
equate access to healthy groceries. If you’re living in this part
of town, you’re also more likely to live in poverty and to suffer
from chronic diseases like diabetes or obesity.
In fact, many social factors decide our fate, including
whether we have sidewalks in our neighborhoods or the
type of house in which we live. Health experts are focusing
more on these circumstances, called “social determinants of
health,” to improve communities and break health barriers
once and for all.
Traditionally, health services have focused on the im-
mediate problem rearing its head in a doctor’s office. For ex-
ample, if a patient seeks treatment for diabetes, they likely
receive medicine for the symptoms. What if health care took
a social approach to the problem? Instead of waiting for a pa-
tient to develop diabetes, what if it could be prevented in the
first place?
Finding these solutions requires looking upstream from
the immediate problem. If we know that poor diet can cause
diabetes, what social factors limit someone from eating a
healthy diet? Living in a food desert and living at the poverty
line can compound, resulting in health problems that might
be more easily preventable for a wealthier family who lives in
a neighborhood with a quality grocery store or farmers mar-
ket nearby.
One additional social factor that wealthier families have
that poor families don’t: time.
“There’s a time factor,” says Tawney Lambert, a creden-
tialed school nurse at Leataata Floyd Elementary, a low-in-
come, Title I school. “It takes time to be healthy, and for our
families, time is prioritized with work.” There are 6 million
American workers who have multiple part-time jobs because
they cannot find full-time work. Part-time jobs also come
with fewer health care benefits — a double whammy of social
factors influencing poor health.
Liza Kirkland, community health and outreach manager
at Dignity Health, and her team are responsible for keeping a
PHOTO: AMY NICOLE PHOTOGRAPHY

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