Michelle Obama will visit Clinton next week, celebrating Mississippi’s success in reducing childhood obesity (if only a little), and punctuating the point that progress is possible if we take the right approach.  That approach is prevention, and focuses on kids in school – where one hopes that essential life lessons are still learned, and lifelong habits of health acquired. 

Kids in Clinton schools are eating better and exercising more, and benefit from a supporting community that “owns” the issue of childhood health.  Now how about that as a revolutionary recipe for success?  A great start, but not enough, to be sure.  Not some, but all Mississippi schools need to be serving nutritious meals all the time.  Not some, but all schools need vigorous programs of health and physical education.  Not some, but all schoolchildren need the support of caring communities (and not just parents, too frequently cued to be scapegoats for larger and systemic problems). 

And beyond those school-based factors, we need everywhere in place broader policies that promote health, well-being, and the prevention of chronic disease.  Policies that curtail consumption of unhealthy food and drink, that encourage biking and walking, that in general – as state health director Dr. Mary Currier has put it – “make the smart choice the easy choice.”

It’s been a wild, wild week at Southern Miss.

The tornado on Feb. 10 has put the campus in cleanup mode, and thanks to the incredible work of our Physical Plant, numerous contractors, and student volunteers, the campus is looking much, much better. Student volunteers converged on the campus a few days after the hurricane (see video below), and the huge volunteer turnout lifted spirits across campus. (Incoming President Rodney Bennett’s encouraging presence on campus was heartily welcomed as well.)

The Honor House sustained only minor damage. We had only a broken window and a porch door off its hinges, even though we are directly north of the Ogletree House, which was heavily damaged. We were incredibly lucky.

The Mississippi Academy of Sciences is holding their annual meeting on our Hattiesburg campus February 21 and 22, 2013 in the Thad Cochran Center. 

This is the  77th Annual Meeting of the Mississippi Academy of Sciences. 

The meeting, which attracts hundreds of attendees representing all of the state’s institutions of higher learning, gives presenters and exhibitors an opportunity to fellowship, network, and present their works. 

All of us in the College of Science and Technology and at Southern Miss are proud to serve as the major sponsor for the event.  A number of our faculty serve as division chairs for the academy. 

Faculty, staff, and students are invited to attend.  I hope to see you there. 

For more information, visit http://msacad.org/

So-called “soft” drinks make an indisputable ”hard” contribution to obesity.  Packed with mega-calories, primarily in the form of high-fructose corn syrup, soft drinks are responsible for packing on the pounds of growing numbers of overweight and obese Americans, and especially kids.  (According to one Centers for Disease Control survey, fully one-quarter of kids’ daily calories come from added sweeteners.)  Curbing sweet-drink consumption, most liklely through a combination of education and regulation, is one key to a much-needed prevention approach to obesity and the myriad chronic diseases associated with it.

So it’s good news that health advocates and public health officials from cities across the country (none in Mississippi, unfortunately), led by the Center for Science in the Public Interest, are pushing the Food and Drug Administration to limit sweeteners in sodas and other beverages. 

Behemoth beverage manufacturers like Coca-Cola and PepsiCo are feeling the heat and hope to stay on the positive side of public opinion by emphazising their own efforts to develop new sweeteners and health-related products and packaging.  That too may be good news if they are sincere, and not just trying to sweet-talk their way out of culpability for perhaps “the” greatest health threat the nation knows.