Change4Life Creates Healthy Kids and Families
The UK's Department of Health Targets Healthy Eating and Fitness
Sep 4, 2009
In January 2009 the UK's Department of Health launched a new healthy eating and fitness initiative. According to data from the department it is likely that 90% of today's children might be overweight or obese by 2050 unless there is a radical lifestyle change. Change4Life was set up to help kids and parents learn how to eat better and to take more exercise to prevent this from happening and to make the whole family fitter and healthier.
What is Change4Life?
The Change4Life campaign aims to "help families eat well, move more, and live longer happier lives". The campaign's website contains a range of useful resources that can help people change the way that they eat and improve the amount of exercise that they take.
Families can visit the site to:
- Get free personalised action plans to help them improve their lifestyles based on what they currently eat and do.
- Get advice on how to shop for healthy foods.
- Find a range of healthy recipes that the whole family will enjoy.
- Get tips of how to manage to eat '5 a day', to cut down on fats and how to make healthy snacks.
- Find ideas on how to get kids and adults to be more active and to take more exercise.
- Locate activities in their local area that they may want to take part in.
A family will have to register to use all of the site's facilities (i.e. personalised plans) but many areas are available for non-members and registration is free. Joining Change4Life will also get some freebies for the kids like stickers and a wall-chart.
How Can Change4Life Help Kids and Parents Understand About Their Health?
The Change4Life site is extremely kid friendly both in terms of its design and its content. Information is presented in a concise and easy to understand way with a lot of bright visuals and graphics. The site also has a range of games that kids can play in various areas. These games will help them learn about healthy eating and fitness in a fun and interactive way.
Parents may also find the site really useful. It gives a range of practical tips and pointers that will help parents understand more about the health and fitness needs of their children. It also helps them understand the differences between the eating and fitness needs of kids compared to adults. This is, for example, an important point as many childhood weight related problems are based on eating portions that are too large.
One of the biggest advantages to Change4Life is that it is something that all the family can participate in and enjoy learning from. The lessons that can be learned here may well be lessons that do make a real difference to the future of any child.
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