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HEALTH CARE QUARTERLY 6-B Long Beach Business Journal
March 4-17, 2014
How Eating Right (Or Wrong) Impacts Daily Life, Overall Health ■ By SAMANTHA MEHLINGER Staff Writer ccording to local nutrition experts, an abundance of studies shows that nutrition impacts our health, happiness and ability to perform daily tasks, yet eating right is still a behavior many Americans struggle with. According to the Centers For Disease Control and Prevention, more than one third of adults in the United States are obese. A slew of campaigns and measures have been implemented in the past few years to combat this problem, from First Lady Michelle Obama’s Let’s Move campaign, to ChooseMyPlate.gov’s food portion chart, to calories being listed on menus. Just last week, the Food and Drug Administration proposed changes to nutrition labels on food packing that would make the calorie content more legible and easier to calculate in relation to portion size.
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Jamie Mok, right, clinical dietitian for Long Beach Memorial Medical Center, confers with her dietetic intern, Alison Tedrow, about ChooseMyPlate.gov’s guidelines for a healthy diet at the hospital’s cafeteria. (Photograph by the Business Journal’s Thomas McConville)
A study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association last month indicated that these types of efforts might be paying off for young children – the American obesity rate among children aged two to five years decreased from 13.9 percent to 8.4 percent between 2003 and 2012. However, there was no significant change in the obesity rate of other age
groups and there was about a six percent increase among women 60 and older. Poor eating choices are often a result of convenience and affordability, according to Koby Moridzadeh, a registered dietitian nutritionist and clinical nutrition manager at Lakewood Regional Medical Center. “Healthy foods like lean cuts of meat and good fruits and vegetables are expensive.
Not everybody can afford that,” Moridzadeh said. “If I have only a couple dollars in my pocket, I can [more easily] afford to go buy three tacos for 99 cents than buy a banana for $1,” she explained. Convenience is also a factor for busy individuals: it’s easier to visit a drive-through window than it is to cook and prepare a meal, Moridzadeh said. Unbalanced diets and inadequate exer-