County receives grant to fight childhood obesity

Kane County is one of only 41 communities awarded a $360,000 grant to fight childhood obesity by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The money will fuel a new task force with the Kane County Health and Development departments as well as urban planners from local communities and community foundations across the county.

The task force will figure out the best use of the grant to address the issue of obese children in the county. One in six children younger than 18 in the county is obese. That's roughly 16 percent of the youth population in the county, according to the health department. The obesity rate is higher among Hispanic and black children.

Local leaders blamed poor urban planning for part of the problem. Many local children don't have the ability to walk to the corner store for a gallon of milk. Not only have many corner stores become extinct, but sidewalks to reach those stores often never existed in the first place in many neighborhoods. Moreover, parents are too afraid of children being abducted to let them walk or ride their bikes to school despite the actual likelihood of abduction being minuscule, officials said.

Kane County Health Department Executive Director Paul Kuehnert said the task force will being meeting as soon as next month. He expects a plan of action to be formulated no later than the fall. The plan will touch on transportation, education, housing, agriculture and local businesses in terms of how all those sectors impact the overall health of local children. The health department has already been working on the problem through the Fit for Kids initiative it began in 2008.

"This is not a single sector's problem or issue," Kuehnert said. "The public sector cannot do this by itself. There are not enough resources there. It's taken us about two or two and a half decades to get into the shape that we are with this childhood obesity epidemic. It's going to take us awhile to turn this around."