The nation's struggle with an ever-increasing obesity rate will take center stage on Saturday at the One Health Obesity Awareness Fair at the Cummings School of Veterinary Medicine in Grafton, Mass.
One Health is a national organization that seeks to improve public health by promoting collaboration and communication between physicians and veterinarians. Each year, the organization chooses a theme for its events nationwide, and the theme for 2009 is obesity.
Cummings School students Annie Shea and Lauren Baker coordinated the fair, which will take place from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m.
One Health's emphasis on communication between medical disciplines is an attempt to address a long-standing dearth of interaction, said Shea, the chair of the One Health Committee of the Tufts Student Chapter of the American Veterinary Medical Association.
"There have not been any other programs that focused on getting students from other programs working together," she said. "Even the medical students don't really understand what a vet student is and what our curriculum looks like."
Undergraduates and others interested in attending can take advantage of a free shuttle that will run between Tufts' Medford/Somerville and Grafton campuses.
"[The] key thing that I wanted was to get students together," Shea said. "Obesity was a pretty easy sell in terms of getting students together to see how their disciplines could contribute."
The fair will feature informational student-run booths, tours of the Grafton campus and educational farm and a free barbecue featuring locally grown food. Tufts professors will give talks on subjects like how to read pet-food labels, heart disease in dogs and the way dietary decisions impact the environment.
The fair will be Tufts' first collaboration with One Health, according to Shea.
"Classically, when you think of One Health, it's three overlapping circles: human health, animal health and environmental health," Shea said. "We have tables from students from five or six different schools doing interactive, educational presentations on how their interests overlap with One Health and obesity."
Veterinary medicine has a great deal to contribute to public health discussions, despite the fact that veterinarians have been on the fringe of such conversations and debates in the past, Shea said.
"Increasingly, veterinarians are becoming key players in the public health field, especially with emerging infectious diseases," she said. "They're doing research in terms of where the next outbreak is going to come ... or studying ways to minimize risk in how people interact with animals."
Dawn Undurraga, a master's student in nutrition communication at the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy, will run a table with a presentation entitled "Feeding Healthy Humans." She aims to educate students on reading labels, sizing portions and making healthy smoothies.
"We just want to encourage people to think about healthy lifestyles as a way to prevent obesity from occurring in the first place," Undurraga said.
One of her games will focus on portion size. Students will be asked to pour the same amount of dried goods into two differently sized bowls. The game illustrates the impact of larger plates and bowls on food consumption.
"It's kind of amazing to see that even when people are trying to pour the same amount, they always wind up with a larger portion when they're pouring into a larger bowl," she said. "We're helping people to realize that really small changes can make a significant difference."
Representatives from The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy will discuss policy issues surrounding the complex relationship between food and the environment.
One table, run by Fletcher School student Ginny Fuller, will address food security and food policy.
Food security is "a community's ability to ensure a constant supply of food," said Fuller, who is studying international environmental and natural resource policies. It can be measured by the livelihoods, human capabilities and resiliency of any given community, and is linked to a community's reliance on international aid, according to Fuller.
"We definitely had to wiggle around the obesity thing," said Fuller of Fletcher School students' participation. "It's not something most of the Fletcher people are dealing with. We're dealing more with issues of starvation."
Fuller praised the opportunity for collaboration, though. "Events like this are an important way to tie it all together," she said.
