On January 12, 2015 we had the pleasure and honor of having Dr. Elsie Taveras from Massachusetts General Hospital visit us here at Penn State. This visit was an exciting opportunity for me because I’ve regarded Dr. Taveras as a role model ever since seeing her on the HBO documentary, The Weight of the Nation. Like me, Dr. Taveras became interested in studying obesity because of her interest in social justice and racial ethnic disparity issues — obesity disproportionately affects populations who have historically been, and currently are, disenfranchised, disempowered, and oppressed. The fact that such drastic disparities emerge in children as young as 0 to 5 years of age indicates that we must acknowledge the impact of social injustice on the micro- and macro-systems that promote the development of obesity (since, to paraphrase Dr. Taveras, 5-year-olds don’t just wake up one day with obesity). Dr. Taveras is among the key influencers who advocated for obesity prevention to focus on modifiable behaviors earlier in the lifespan, even into the pre-natal period.
Through attending the joint KL2 Group/COPT lunch and the seminar hosted by Nutritional Sciences/COPT, I learned about Dr. Taveras’ innovative, impactful work in both the etiology and interventions for childhood obesity. I was impressed by how insightful and highly clinically relevant her interventions were (i.e. using videoconferencing for obesity management appointments, geo-mapping children to their community resources, collective framework impact to engage every sector of the community) – perhaps as a function of her being a pediatrician with personal experience working with patients. I was also fortunate to have an individual meeting with Dr. Taveras and receive some advice on bringing disparity issues into the childhood obesity research arena. Overall, the following takeaway points were particularly memorable me:
1) When working with very low-income families, we must be flexible and understand that some things we can change and some we can’t; we can then try to help families make changes, no matter how small, wherever possible
2) Racial/ethnic and socioeconomic disparities issues have not been receiving as much attention and prioritization as they deserve, unfortunately, since these issues seemingly impact only a portion of the population (I believe that disparities affect all of us, however. We are all connected and our health is inextricably tied to the health of our food system, our physical environment, our broader economic, political, and historical context, and of all the people who comprise those systems). We can then use opportunities conferred by working on issues recognized to affect the entire populations, such as obesity, to spur discussions about the social justice roots of these issues (e.g. “childhood obesity transverses all age, racial/ethnic, and socioeconomic groups…AND, it disproportionately burdens racial/ethnic minorities and socioeconomically-disadvantaged populations”).
-Jacinda Li
