Dropping the Pop

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Soda pop, sugary juices, iced tea and energy drinks have become a dietary staple for many kids in the Western Hemisphere, despite the fact that these drinks rot your teeth and can add on an unhealthy amount of extra weight.

In light of this, the Public Health Department of the Cree Board of Health and Social Services of James Bay put on an annual campaign to challenge kids to stop drinking these kinds of unhealthy beverages for five consecutive days.

According to Helen Porada, Diabetes Educator for Public Health Nutrition, the Drop the Pop campaign was inspired by a Nunavut project. The CBHSSJB adapted the documentation for their program for the Cree communities from the Nunavut program but modified it to fit the communities’ needs.

This five-day challenge is a public-health awareness campaign to promote primary prevention, which is to work with the younger population to avert eventual disease from occurring. Since heavy sugar consumption can lead to weight gain and eventual obesity, many diseases such as diabetes can be prevented if individuals develop healthier eating patterns earlier on in life.

During the five-day challenge, students throughout Eeyou Istchee were asked to drink milk, water and no more than one cup of juice per day in lieu of sugary beverages. All of the students from the pre-kindergarten classes up to Secondary 5 were welcomed to take part in the challenge.

In support of the health-inspired challenge, many of the stores and restaurants that sold sweet and sugary drinks throughout the communities also took the products off the shelves for the week that their community was participating and replaced them with healthier options.

Schools throughout the nine communities were visited by nutritionists, dental hygienists and community-health representatives one week prior to the challenge to explain to students what they had to do. Porada said that these workers were all instrumental in carrying off the campaign successfully.

Each school chose one week during the month of March or April, with March being health month and April being dental-health month, to participate in the challenge. Drop the Pop was a voluntary program and students had the option of choosing whether to participate or not.

According to Porada, the challenge was a two-pronged campaign. The first element was the actual challenge to forgo the beverages and compete for prizes in doing so. The second consisted of classroom activities geared towards learning the content of the campaign.

To aid the teachers who were conducting the programs in their classrooms, CBHSSJB provided them with a teachers’ guide that featured lesson plans to support the campaign. The guides were a compilation of six activities on nutrition and six activities on dental health for the classroom.

“They were also encouraged to do other kinds of activities on their own,” said Porada. “Some schools and some classes were very creative about the issues.”

Part of these classroom activities included making cow masks with the youngest children to encourage them to drink milk. In the higher grades, students looked at math and biology lessons that tied into the campaign such as calculating how much money they could save it they stopped buying pop and the roles that water and calcium from milk played in the human body.

Porada was delighted to discover that in Chisasibi the school held a workshop to make smoothies with the students and then compiled a cookbook containing all of the recipes the students concocted as a take home for them.

In all, Public Health has tabulated that a total of 1,800 students participated throughout all nine communities which was a marked improvement over last year’s 1,200 participants. In that Eeyou Istchee’s total student population is 3,600, participation reached the 50% mark.

For the challenge, each classroom put up posters on which students wrote down their names and were asked each day to indicate whether or not they had drunk any pop. At the end of the challenge the posters were sent in to Public Health so that the numbers could be counted. Porada said that they were unable to obtain all of the posters so the participation might actually be higher than originally anticipated.

Still, some students felt that they either couldn’t break the pop cycle or that they just loved sugary drinks way too much to participate. These answers emerged after the challenge when questionnaires were distributed to students participating in some communities.

“Nineteen percent of the students who did not participate said it was too hard. They could not drop the pop for five days. Can you imagine how addicted they are?” stated Porada.

Amelie Roy Fleming, a nutritionist in Wemindji, went from class to class with the aid of two dental hygienists before and during the campaign to explain it and participate in some activities with the students.

After a concerted effort on behalf of Public Health, she said she can see the message catching on.

“They knew about it because it’s been going for three years now. They actually called me ‘Drop the Pop.’ It was as though this was written on my forehead,” said Fleming.

Though the focus was on pop and sweet drinks for the younger children, Fleming said she also focused on the dangers of energy drinks with the teens.

“I read the label to them to raise caution and awareness to show them that people with heart problems and pregnant women should not drink them. I wanted to show them that this is serious, that it’s not just about the sugar but also the caffeine,” said Fleming.

To motivate students to stay off the pop, Public Health also added a competitive edge to the challenge so that individual students and classes could win prizes. Classes that won received $50 UNICEF gift cards to be given to the UNICEF charity of their choice.

While Fleming thought the prizes were “awesome,” she also recognized that perhaps some of the younger children didn’t really understand this kind of a prize and were unsure that they were even necessary for the challenge. In her opinion, many of the participants were happy to just join in and do the challenge with their friends. Even some families did it in solidarity with their children.

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