Using Art to Tackle Obesity and Diabetes in Youth
Type 2 diabetes was once known as adult-onset diabetes. But now that term is outdated: Increasingly it is a disease that begins in childhood.
Between 2000 and 2009, the rate of Type 2 diabetes in children jumped more than 30 percent — and it is climbing especially fast among children from poor and minority families. The prevalence of the disease doubled in the last decade among black children and tripled among American Indian children. Black and Hispanic children have eight times the risk of developing the disease compared with others.
Faced with these startling numbers, public health experts and arts educators have teamed up to try a novel approach to preventing the disease in young people. The campaign, called The Bigger Picture, aims to get teenagers and young adults to view the diabetes crises in their communities not just as a medical problem related to poor diet and a lack of exercise but as a social justice problem tied to stress, poverty, violence and limited access to healthy and affordable foods.
At its core, the program, created by the University of California, San Francisco School of Medicine and Youth Speaks, a nonprofit arts group, uses art to confront obesity and diabetes in youth. Poet mentors and doctors have been conducting workshops in poor communities, where they educate high-risk youth about the epidemic and provide a platform for them to create spoken-word poems to express how diabetes and obesity affect them. The youth perform their poems live at public high schools and turn them into music videos filmed in their neighborhoods.
An article released on Wednesday in JAMA highlights some of the latest spoken-word videos, which were released on The Bigger Picture websiteand spread via social media. Among the new videos is one entitled “The Longest Mile,” by Tassiana Willis, a young poet from Oakland, Calif., whose family has been hit hard by diabetes. She describes growing up in a poor community where family trips to fast food outlets were a “tragic tradition” that ultimately led to obesity.