Monday, November 16, 2015

Designing Healthy Cities to Reverse Obesity and NCD Epidemics Columbia University EPIC Program, June 1-5, 2015



by: Adelphi’s CHI Summer Scholar Diane Dembicki, PhD, LMT, CYT, Clinical Associate Professor & Director of the online MS Nutrition Program College of Nursing & Public Health, Adelphi University

This course was about the built environment of cities, particularly New York City, and how it impacts active living and healthy eating, as well as successful policy and practice interventions and strategies for improvement.  It emphasized non-communicable diseases (NCDs)—obesity, diabetes, heart disease—which are the leading causes of death globally and obesity is rising rapidly.  Obesity risk factors can be impacted, for better or worse, by the built environment—buildings, streets, and communities.

The instructor was Dr. Karen Lee and the staff at the other locales we visited.  The classroom lectures were mixed with field trips from the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University to a healthy living housing project in the Bronx to a healthy and green environment global architect team in East Harlem to healthy urban designs at the NYC Department of Planning in lower Manhattan to an educational walk on the High Line from end to end.  It was truly experiential as we practiced what we learned.

I designed and teach NUT553 Nutrition and Obesity which is halfway through the MS in Nutrition Program (“making a difference in community health and quality of life”) and which the inaugural cohort recently completed.  It is planned that these graduate students, and the subsequent cohorts who follow, as they are taught by experts in the discipline with the most up-to-date experience and training, such as this EPIC course, will eventually be applying what they learn, conducting research, developing programs, and contributing to the health of today’s society.  When the MS in Nutrition Program was first developed, former Adelphi University President Robert Scott, in wanting to do something about the health of Long Island residents after the CSI Vital Signs reports, suggested it have courses concerning three of the top NCD epidemics—obesity, diabetes, and cardiovascular disease (all three of which have related risk factors and are co-morbidities)—and it does.  Besides NUT553, I designed NUT554 Nutrition and Diabetes and NUT558 Nutrition and Cardiovascular Disease, heart disease being the number one cause of death in the U.S.

The NCDs obesity and diabetes have related risk factors and are co-morbidities.  It was last Spring that one of the Nutrition graduate students, Allison Riccardi, in an independent study with me on Diabetes Prevention Programs focusing on Native Americans, visited the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to research that topic.  At the National Library of Medicine (NLM) there, we were given a personal curator-led tour of the special Native American exhibit called "Native Voices".  At that time, on the NLM real time digital screen, the most searched word was Diabetes.  Over this Summer, the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI) announced the CHI was approved funding for a grant focused on Native American Health and Wellness—the Reservation-Based Diabetes and Obesity Prevention Project.  This is a three-way collaboration between the Adelphi University CHI, the Unkechaug Nation, and Winthrop University Hospital Diabetes and Obesity Institute to improve diabetes care on the Poospatuck Reservation in Mastic, NY.  It all comes together for evidence-based community health.