Mar

17

Topic: Childhood Obesity News - • Fighting childhood obesity is an investment businesses can't ignore - The Ann Arbor News - MLive.com

Filed Under Childhood Obesity News | Leave a Comment

These health behaviors speak directly to the business bottom line through decreased productivity and escalating costs to insure our employees, to say nothing about what they imply for the health and well-being of our workers and their families. If we don’t rethink the family, educational, health care and social systems that engage our children and don’t come to see how they must all be integrated in addressing this epidemic, we’ll simply produce more of the same alarming statistics. There is a healthy recognition in Lansing that, historically, our educational, family, health care and public health systems have not been well-integrated, nor have they sufficiently emphasized prevention and promoted healthy behaviors in our children. This effort is bringing together decision makers from government, the public and private sectors, school districts, health care and nonprofit organizations to help the state develop a strategic policy agenda to permanently reverse the childhood obesity trends in our state. As a member of one of the Healthy Kids, Healthy Michigan workgroups, I have been impressed with the determination of all the participants to do the hard thinking and debating that will lead to sound and realizable policy recommendations in the near future. Starting with the Michigan Childhood Immunization Registry - now known as the Michigan Care Improvement Registry - and more recently with the Michigan Disease Surveillance System, the Michigan Department of Community Health has made a sustained commitment to use technology to assess how we are doing on preventive care, understand patterns of health risk and target interventions to address diseases that threaten our population. Read Childhood Obesity

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