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Karina Rosario, a 16-year-old peer health educator, wants to help curb excessive weight gain in young people. This year, she worked with 11 other teens to produce a guide to help make that happen.
“We hear a lot about obesity,” said Rosario, who works after school at the Southern Jamaica Plain Health Center. “There are a lot of things we should do to prevent it.”
Through the Health Careers Ambassadors Program (H-CAP), Rosario and her peers published the program’s second volume of C.H.I.L.L.: Community Health Living and Learning Guide.
H-CAP—run by the Hyde Square Task Force in collaboration with four community health centers including Brookside and Southern Jamaica Plain—celebrated the new guide last month with a presentation about nutrition and fitness. In the guide, teens can find shopping tips to create healthier meals, as well as recipes, exercise tips and information on illnesses related to obesity. As a supplement to the guide, the students conducted a study on the choices offered by local grocery stores.
“We compared grocery stores in different communities,” said Eric Avalo, 18. “We found that in Roxbury, there was less of a variety of brands and less healthy food than higher income communities. We want them to offer more variety. We want to know why it’s different.”