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.
