The Heart & Stroke Foundation has launched an initiative that may help reduce the $46 million Government spends annually on diabetes and heart diseases.The effort, called Switch It Up, Protect Our Children, is a mass media campaign targeting schoolchildren.
The purpose of the programme is to get all public and private secondary and primary schools involved in pledging allegiance to the fight against non-communicable diseases (NCDs). In doing so, those schools would put programmes in place to encourage students to drink more water, eat healthier food and significantly reduce the amount of sugary and salty food sold at schools.
Five schools are on board so far – Reynold Weekes Primary, Christ Church Foundation, The St Michael School, Rock Christian Primary and Queen’s College.
It is believed that through this initiative children would go into adulthood fully understanding the dangers of eating fast food and being inactive and would make wiser choices. Eventually, the cases of people with NCDs would decrease and incidence of childhood obesity would also decrease.
Eight out ten deaths in Barbados are caused by NCDs, with 31 per cent of children in the island being overweight, while many are experiencing tooth decay as a result of bad eating habits (SB)
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