Kaiser Permanente Colorado has donated $16 million to build a statewide program to fight obesity, which has more than doubled since 1990.
Gov. Bill Ritter announced the donation Thursday, saying the money will support a range of community-based health programs in playgrounds, schools, businesses and sen ior centers.
Although Colorado ranks among the least obese states in the nation, waistlines have been growing steadily since 2000, Lt. Gov. Barbara O’Brien said.
More than 18 percent of adults here are now considered obese, O’Brien said. One in four school-age children is overweight.
The consequences include heart disease, diabetes, hypertension, asthma — and early death.
“We lose about 6,000 Coloradans a year to preventable conditions associated with excess weight,” said Ned Calonge, the state’s chief medical officer.
Rising obesity also contributes to rising health care costs, he said.
The new state program was announced the same day as an article in the New England Journal of Medicine warned that by 2050, childhood obesity will shorten life expectancy in the United States by two to five years.
That’s a bigger impact than from all types of cancer combined, calculated author David Ludwig, a pediatric obesity expert at at the Children’s Hospital Boston and Harvard Medical School.
The new Kaiser money will be distributed through LiveWell Colorado, a nonprofit established this year to support community-level obesity programs in 11 Colorado regions, from Northeast Denver and Broomfield to Durango.
Funded by Kaiser, the state health department and the Colorado Health Foundation, LiveWell has already brought exercise equipment and pedometers to Broomfield hair salon Imagine, where owner Joyce Townsend has made them available to clients.
“They like to talk with their friends when they’re here, doing all these comparisons and challenges,” Townsend said.
In Durango, a LiveWell program has linked local farmers with the school district to get more fresh fruit and vegetables to children, said Donna Lynne, president of Kaiser Permanente Colorado.
The pilot program has also helped residents of the Park Hill neighborhood in northeast Denver lobby grocery stores to move into the neighborhood.
Today, Lynne said, many residents buy groceries at mini-markets that offer an excess of processed food and very little produce.
LiveWell will now expand statewide, Ritter said, and will coordinate all of Colorado’s obesity programs.
Children’s Hospital has also created its own 10-week program called the Shapedown clinic for overweight children.
The clinic uses a clinical social worker, registered dietician and certified therapeutic recreation specialist to shape a program for each child and family.
Colorado’s new initiative appears to be the most comprehensive state program in the country, Lynne and Calonge said.
“This could be a good start,” said Reginald Washington, a pediatric cardiology professor at the University of Colorado Denver School of Medicine.
It’s going to take a massive effort at many levels, Washington said, from educating families to convincing the U.S. Department of Agriculture to stop subsidizing corn used to make corn syrup.
“Nothing that has been tried on a neighborhood or on a national scale has worked very effectively so far,” Washington said. “There are so many factors in play.”
Opening new playgrounds tends to increase local children’s physical activity, he said, but research has yet to show that those children lose weight. “You’re not controlling what’s going on at home, what they’re eating at school,” Washington said.
Nor has pulling high-calorie soft drinks out of schools produced substantial weight loss, Washington said.
“I don’t think people should believe this new program will end the problem,” Washington said. “But I think it will be a good start.”
Katy Human: 303-954-1910 or khuman@denverpost.com
