The goal of Princetonians Against Obesity, which is still in its infancy, is three-fold, according to Joseph Park ’13, one of the founders of the group. First, the group intends to raise awareness on campus and in the community by hosting guest speaker events and film screenings about the issue. The organization hopes to organize charitable races, with the proceeds going to the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, a local hospital that devotes much of its research to the nutritional aspects of obesity.
Secondly, Park added that the group plans to take high school students from Trenton to the Princeton-Blairstown Center, a local center tasked with educating and inspiring at-risk youth through enriching activities. He noted that they plan to pair Princeton students, particularly Outdoor Action leaders, with the high school students from Trenton.
“[We can] show them that being outdoors can be fun and teach them an appreciation for exercise and being active,” Park said. “We think that kids don’t have the opportunity to do stuff like that and, consequently, are stuck indoors.”
Lastly, Park said the group hopes to facilitate policy debates about obesity.
“We have a lot of people who are the right people on campus to tackle these issues, and we just need to bring them together,” Park said.
Park, a molecular biology major with a global health policy certificate, explained that the idea for the group started with his impression that there wasn’t enough awareness given to the issue of obesity on campus.
“[Obesity] is a major health care concern because, although it’s not a disease, it is a predisposition for a lot of other cardiovascular diseases and strokes.”
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 35.7 percent of U.S. adults and approximately 17 percent of Americans between ages 2 and 19 are obese.
“The numbers tell us it is a growing issue,” Park said. “We feel that because it is such a pressing issue, we should try to highlight and bring more attention to it. Campus is a great place to start,” he added.
Some members of the new group had prior experience with the public policy issue.
Last fall break, Maia Ten Brink ’13 and Benjamin Levenson ’13 led a breakout trip to Chicago to learn more about child obesity. John Monagle ’12, another member of the group, said the trip looked at the role that other factors — such as the proximity to supermarkets — play in the prevalence of child obesity. The group also met with a local grocer who sells healthy snacks to young students after school.
Monagle’s interest in the subject encouraged him to write both a junior paper and his senior thesis about child obesity. A Wilson School major, Monagle said that his senior thesis was just an extension of what he wrote during his junior year.
“We tried to see what parents’ levels of understanding are about childhood obesity and if they are able to identify if their own child is overweight,” Monagle said about his thesis. He examined parents’ attitudes toward the topic in hopes of using the information to make parents “more effective stakeholders” in the issue.
But Park explained that child obesity is not just due to parents’ negligence. It is also caused by many factors, including education level and economic status.
“Groceries are expensive, and if you don’t have much money, it’s cheaper to go to fast food places,” Park explained. “Even if you are not pressed for money but pressed for time, it is much more convenient.”
Park added that because students here are privileged and tend to not be pressed for money, obesity is not a major problem on campus.
“Princeton kids are smart and, let’s face it, well-to-do,” Park said. “[The campus] highlights the skew for the tendency of obesity to go against the disadvantaged and the marginalized. There are socioeconomic roots to this problem,” he added.
Yet despite Princeton students’ socioeconomic advantages, he still said that more can be done to promote healthier eating on campus. He said he is a fan of Forbes vegetarian nights and the great diversity of eating options it provides.
“You can tell it is popular because people flock there on Wednesday nights when they have these dinners,” he said. Park said the group hopes to start similar nights at other residential colleges and broaden healthy eating options.
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