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CAMP LEJEUNE, N.C. - Most early dawn hours find Marine Corps Base Camp Lejeune Marines yawning into the new day with a variety of muscle building workouts. Marines and sailors aboard the base carve out a piece of turf to call their own every morning so they can put their bodies through their daily dose of physical training. But the Health Promotion and Wellness team aboard MCB Camp Lejeune knows that healthy service members need to be more than physically fit and mentally tough: they need to be properly fed.
The Healthy Heart Class offered by Naval Hospital Camp Lejeune’s Health Promotion and Wellness team kicks off another course March 1. The class focuses on cardiovascular health and brings to the table Dietary Approaches to Stop Hypertension, better known as the DASH diet.
“The fact that you guys go out and exercise all the time, doesn’t mean that you can eat anything you want whenever you want,” said John Swett, the coordinator for the Healthy Heart Class and a health educator for Naval Hospital Camp Lejeune. “I don’t care how fit a Marine is, it doesn’t mean that he is healthy.”
Swett said health professionals aboard the base noticed a need to address cardiovascular risks for base personnel several years ago. Many of the younger service members, often in their early and mid-20s, needed treatment for cardiovascular problems.
The DASH diet offers an easy way to attack one of the most important areas of heart health, a balanced diet. It is endorsed by the U.S. Department of Agriculture as an ideal eating plan for Americans, and U.S. News and World Report ranked it as the best overall diet for a second year in a row. But, it doesn’t take a nutritional specialist to follow this diet.
DASH, originally developed by the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute in 1992, is a very simple diet plan, said Glenda Aultowski, community health nurse for Health Promotion and Wellness, NHCL. “There’s nothing difficult about it. People have more difficulty, if they have difficulty at all, learning to simplify what they eat.”
DASH limits the intake of sweets and red meats, while encouraging healthier alternatives. “It has everything. It has fruits, it has vegetables and proteins,” said Aultowski, who later interjected, “french fries are not vegetables.”
It’s a diet for a broad spectrum of people, and DASH can lead to more than just a happy heart. The DASH diet benefits people with various chronic illnesses, and it has some nice perks to round it out. “On top of everything else, the one thing that gets people to go on a diet on their own is weight loss,” said Aultowski. “If you’re using the DASH diet anyway for health conditions, a bonus is you lose weight.”
The problem is that many of the people that attend the class already have chronic heart problems. Swett wants people to come in before a chronic illness has a chance to take hold. The Healthy Heart Class, like many of the classes offered by the Health Promotion and Wellness team, is about having a healthy lifestyle. This lifestyle is not limited to individuals, but also applies to parents with children.
“It’s significant that we are beginning to have problems with children and young adolescents,” said Aultowski. “The family is that adolescent’s lifestyle. So when we change the lifestyle of an adolescent, we try to change the lifestyle of the family.”
Like DASH, the Health Promotion and Wellness team offers a multi-pronged approach toward a healthier lifestyle. The Healthy Heart Class offers recipes, a DASH diet book and they have the expert “hook-up”.
“We have specialists coming out to teach this information. These are specialists that participants can actually ask questions then and there,” said Swett. Participants have one-on-one opportunities with the specialists after each period of instruction. The class brings in a registered dietitian, professional fitness trainers and a registered pharmacist.
The class is broken down into four one-hour sessions: cardiac mechanics, nutrition and heart disease, cardiac medications and exercise and heart disease. Numerous information ranging from heart function to healthy snacking are provided in addition to the expert advice that participants receive.
New courses start the first Thursday of every month, with classes each Thursday afternoon. The first three classes run from 6:30 to 7:30 p.m., and the last class runs from 5:30 to 6:30 p.m.
Health Promotion and Wellness offers several other classes ranging from tobacco cessation to diabetes management. Their classes are open and free to active-duty personnel and their families, retired military, their families and Department of Defense employees. Anyone interested in attending a course or seeking information can call 451-3712.
| Date Taken: | 02.29.2012 |
| Date Posted: | 02.29.2012 15:02 |
| Story ID: | 84515 |
| Location: | WEST ALLIS, WISCONSIN, US |
| Web Views: | 80 |
| Downloads: | 0 |
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