UH to Receive More Than $2 Million to Prevent Childhood Obesity

Sen. Brian Schatz

On Monday, July 2, 2018, Sen. Brian Schatz announced that the National Institute of Food and Agriculture has awarded $2,125,903 to the University of Hawai‘i for the Children’s Healthy Living Center of Excellence (CHL), which is a leader on children’s obesity prevention programs and policies for U.S. jurisdictions in the Pacific region. Working in underserved Pacific populations, CHL will use the funding to train educators, practitioners and researchers on childhood obesity prevention and measure the success of different methods over the course of six years.

“Childhood obesity is a problem everywhere, but our state doesn’t have the same resources as those on the mainland to address the issue,” said Sen. Schatz, a member of the Senate Appropriations Committee. “This funding allows our state to partner with Alaska and other Pacific islands to better understand what we can do to keep our kids healthy.”

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has a national program to survey health and nutrition, but it does not cover Hawai‘i, Alaska, or nine other remote Pacific jurisdictions of the United States. CHL is a partnership among these 11 jurisdictions that combines efforts to train a public health nutrition work force, research public health nutrition and educate the public about nutrition and health.