By Michele Tenney
Here’s To Your Health
Michele Tenney
It’s been the passion of my heart to see the town I love and live in take steps toward living a healthier life, especially in the lives of our children.
I have served the Orange elementary school system as the Healthy Lifestyle Committee chair for the last five years and have seen some improvements. Yet we have so much farther to go.
The most significant change was removing food celebrations from the classrooms. While this decision was made primarily to protect children with allergies, it carried a much larger weight than most know. This one decision lowered the body mass index of each school by 11 percent, permanently.
Though this is significant, it’s such a small piece of the pie (no pun intended). We need to press forward. The Healthy Lifestyles Committee has worked with our superintendent, who fully supports our efforts. The committee has been trying to raise funds to get balance balls in the classrooms to replace seats so children can work on their core while working at their desks. Many other great ideas are in the works, but so much more needs to be done.
Over the years I have asked myself: Why is it that we have a town with eight working farms and yet our children know little or nothing at all about the farmers who live and work in our town? Why is our famer’s market one of the smaller ones compared to surrounding towns? Why are parents so apprehensive about healthier changes in our schools? Why don’t we have healthier restaurant options? Why isn’t our Senior Center thriving? Why aren’t more of our children walking and biking to school?
The answer is simple: it’s just not our culture. We are not a bound community when it comes to health and exercise. In a conversation with a friend, I was encouraged to investigate the five “blue zones,” areas of the world where people live the longest and are healthiest. I watched several YouTube videos of Dan Buettner, a National Geographic journalist and longevity and happiness expert who at last gave me the answers I was desperately seeking. We need to make this a community affair in order to create long-lasting changes in our town and extend the lives of not only our children, but our elderly population and everyone in between.
One example of how we can make a significant change is by adding sidewalks to our town. I serve on the Orange Board of Health and before the summer began, we had a gentleman from American Medical Response give us a presentation on the emergency calls in our town. The majority of these calls were from elderly people falling in their homes.
According to Buettner, the main reason the elderly population doesn’t get out is because they don’t feel safe and are afraid of falling. Not only does this prohibit the elderly population from getting out for a stroll, it puts the children who do ride bikes or walk to a friend’s house at risk of being injured by a distracted or speeding driver.
I believe we have the power to change our community. It can be done. As Neil Armstrong said, it’s “One small step for a man, one giant step for mankind.”