Representatives of the state Department of Health and other organizations on Thursday called for volunteers to help implement a 10-year-plan aimed at reducing the state's obesity rate.
At a meeting at Health Department headquarters in Little Rock, the effort's coordinators outlined the Healthy Active Arkansas plan, which was developed by public health officials, researchers and others and endorsed in October by Gov. Asa Hutchinson.
A report released last year by the Trust for America's Health and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation ranked Arkansas No. 1 in 2014 in the number of adults who were considered obese.
The report found that 35.9 percent of adult Arkansans were considered obese based on their reported height and weight compared with 34.6 percent in 2013.
The volunteers will serve on teams assigned to work on the nine "priority areas" named in the plan.
Those areas are ensuring that communities have ample places to walk and exercise, encouraging employers to offer healthful food in workplaces, providing healthful food in schools, providing physical education and other opportunities for exercise in schools, promoting workplace wellness programs, ensuring that consumers have access to healthful food in stores, curbing the consumption of sugar-sweetened beverages, promoting breastfeeding and implementing a marketing campaign to encourage healthy behavior.
An operations team assigned to implement the plan includes the leaders of each priority area team as well as other members, said Marisha DiCarlo, who is leading the Health Department's implementation efforts along with Namvar Zohoori, the department's chief science officer.
The team leaders include representatives of Metroplan, the state Department of Education, the University of the Ozarks, the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences, Baptist Health and the Winthrop Rockefeller Institute.
About 80 people attended the meeting in Little Rock on Thursday while others watched on video screens at 25 other locations around the state, DiCarlo said. Forty-nine people signed up to serve on a team.
Others who want to volunteer can sign up by emailing DiCarlo at marisha.dicarlo@arkansas.gov.
"People are really coming together around this," DiCarlo said.
Metro on 02/05/2016