County health professional says exercise is key to disease prevention

By: Kelli Huinker, EP-C

As a Public Health professional, I often get the question, “what do you do?” If I had a synonym for Public Health, it would be PREVENTION. Whether it’s preventing diabetes, food borne illnesses, mumps, or even emergency disasters, public health professionals are always trying to stay ahead of the curve when it comes to preventing or delaying negative health outcomes. Sometimes our efforts are extremely successful, like eliminating infectious diseases, and sometimes we scratch our heads and circle around to the drawing board time and time again, looking for solutions, i.e. obesity.

As an educator for the Cerro Gordo County Department of Public Health, I get the opportunity to teach a wide variety of programs to residents. Recently, most of our classes focus on preventing chronic diseases, like heart disease, diabetes, and high blood pressure. Diseases once considered “end of life” diseases are now becoming common in young adults and children.

My educational background is in Exercise Science. Every class I took left me with very little doubt how important physical activity was to staying healthy and preventing chronic disease. When I joined the public health staff and began teaching “health promotion” classes, I was at a loss for why people didn’t listen to me when I told them to get active. “Just EXERCISE!” I would spout off dozens of benefits: lower blood pressure, better insulin sensitivity, better cardiac function, improved balance, better sleep, weight loss, less stress, etc.… But rarely would even 50% of the group decide EXERCISE was the solution for them. The primary reasons participants gave to not exercise seemed to be lack of time and motivation. “Who has time to EXERCISE?” “Where do I get the energy to EXERCISE?”

So, Public Health had to spin the conversation. If residents don’t relate to the benefits from exercise, maybe we could get them active without them realizing they were investing time and energy into it! How do we do this? We add sidewalks and bike trails to communities so you can explore nature (not exercise). We start building parking lots on the back side of buildings so you must walk a few extra steps to shop (not exercise). We decorate stairwells with art so people limit their use of the elevator to check out which Picasso is hanging up this week (again, not exercise). Why, we even install pop-up desks at the job site and/or move the printer to a different room, so we have to get out of our chair more (not exercise).

You’ve probably noticed lots of these environmental changes happening in your community, in your worksite, in your school, in your church, and maybe even in your home. It’s evident PREVENTION is all around us, and everyone is becoming a piece of the solution… sometimes without even breaking a sweat!