Health Literacy: A New Focus For a Healthy Generation
by Haleigh Holtman
America’s health is changing. From an early age, children are shown commercials, television shows, and unhealthy food in brightly colored, eye-catching, easily accessible packaging. While adults grew up in a time where most meals — if not all — were home cooked, today’s child eats more fast food without understanding the implications behind this type of diet. Without knowledge of what is in all of the junk drinks sponsored by athletes, sugary cereals with cartoon mascots, and easily available junk food, children are at a loss nutritionally.
Teachers and parents alike can help prevent this — by teaching children how to read and comprehend nutrition labels and food advertisements properly can help affect the nutrition decisions that children make on their own every day. Fostering educational health and health literacy early in life may help to positively affect people for their entire lives.
Health Literacy and Education
The key to understanding what exactly it is that is being asked of educators and guardians is breaking down and fully comprehending what health literacy and health education are and why they are vital for children and adults everywhere.
According to Sandra Vamos, an associate professor of health education at the University of Houston-Victoria, health literacy is “…the use of a wide range of skills that improve the ability of people to act on information to live healthier lives.”
Using literacy skills in order to comprehend health information and then implementing information learned in order to become healthier individuals are skills that need to be taught in a society overloaded with fats, sugars, and sedentary lifestyles.
Similarly, the World Health Organization, or WHO, defines health education, as “…any combination of learning experiences designed to help individuals and communities improve their health, by increasing their knowledge or influencing their attitudes.”
Varying the types of learning experiences that help people and communities improve their health makes health education more comprehensible and implementable to a vaster number of people than sticking with one set way. People that have barely been exposed to health education are at a greater risk for health related diseases than people with exposure and comprehension of the information taught.
This happens because people that have good health literacy skills are able to use them to understand health education, seek out more health education, and then use that information to better their health. The balance between good health literacy and good health education is more heavily reliant on health literacy — because without the tools to understand health education, information taught is useless to the student.
The real issue behind health literacy lies in literacy itself; while 30 million Americans read at a 5th grade level, the average reading level of health information is at 10th grade. Likewise, in a study done by the National Center for Education Statistics, 75 million adult Americans have basic or below basic health literacy, and only 25 million are proficient.
How Can We Change This?
Health education and health literacy are interconnected through family, schools, community, and the government. In order to help combat low health literacy and health education rates in a world where healthcare and unhealthy lifestyles are only increasing in their influence on public life, one school of thought is to make health education and health literacy more important in elementary education. This would be seen as especially helpful in areas of high low-income, minority populations, or children and adolescents. These communities are some of the highest at risk for obesity, diabetes, and have very low health literacy scores. The idea behind introducing increased health education and literacy in these communities and schools is that by empowering people that feel powerless can help make them less at risk for health issues and can help them to feel more in control of their health and lives (Bergsma, 2004). It is important for children to understand that they are in charge of — at the very least — an aspect of their lives, such as health.
According to Lynda Bergsma (2008) from the University of Arizona, “Some initiatives to empower children and youth to take control of some aspects of their life in general, and some determinants of health in particular, have shown positive effects” (p. 153).
Because many children feel like they are not in control of anything, showing them how to properly care for themselves in a healthy way shows children how people make informed decisions that can better their lives.
One thing that can positively affect the way children view health while also teaching children good health literacy is by combining media education with health education. By letting children use media as an outlet to voice their opinions on health and what it means to be healthy, not only can children gain practice in core subjects, such as science, writing, and reading, they can also gain knowledge in the subject of health.
This can help to give them the feeling of empowerment as well, according to Bergsma (2008), “This [using media] would foster the powerful attributes of social competence, problem-solving skills, autonomy, and sense of purpose that are in and of themselves all protective factors that foster resiliency in youth” (p. 154).
As the trend of focusing on the view that children need to be encouraged and shown how to become their own self confident person continues to grow, so too will the use of empowered health education by educators.
For example a middle school in New Mexico, Wilson Middle School, joined in on a statewide program started by Blue Cross and Blue Shield to help educate students about health literacy and their own school based health centers.
Elev8 Kids (2013), a website that promotes child achievements, stated that it brought together people “…from school based health centers, school health advisory councils, youth advisory groups and other youth groups…” to teach and inform other people about health through memes on social media.
This project, which spanned 10 schools, had students from each school create memes, had a goal to improve “…youth health literacy through timely, accurate, and engaging medical and behavioral health information via social media…” not only allowed students to express themselves in ways that they were familiar with, it also empowered the students that created these memes and helped to foster their leadership skills.
There are multiple types of health education but the major differences in health education come in the goals and expectations of each individual health education system, they can be either public health or public education.
The goals of these two options, as evidenced by the National Education Association Health Information Network (2009), “The goal of public education is to increase students’ knowledge and skills, while a goal of public health is to reduce the burden of mortality and morbidity from disease” (p. 1).
With these goals outlined, it is easier to understand why schools and health care professionals tackle health and view health literacy in different ways. This information also helps to support why teaching both health literacy and health education are important.
In a study conducted by Iman Sharif and Arthur Blank (2009), the relationship between health literacy and obesity in children was explored — “we found, in this cross-sectional sample of overweight children, that higher literacy was significantly correlated with a lower body mass index, adjusted for age and gender”(section 4.1).
With higher literacy skills comes lower body mass index, meaning that students that have successful literacy comprehension skills are able to comprehend health information and then make good choices with this information. This study also discusses how people need to identify new ways to teach health education and health literacy to students that are at risk for obesity.
However, the authors (2009) do state that this study does not answer every question on the connections between literacy and weight, “Also, qualitative work is needed to explore the relationship between self-efficacy, weight, and literacy issues within the context of both culture and family” (section 4.1).
In order to truly understand whether or not literacy and weight are connected, there need to be more types of studies done in a variety of cultural demographics. It is possible perhaps no matter the health literacy skills of some cultures or families, they will always carry around extra weight, or maybe some cultures eat food with less fats and sugars, and therefore they do not need to have as strong health literacy skills to stay relatively thin.
Health literacy and health education are two topics that have always been, especially in recent years, frequently in the spotlight for a variety of reasons — however in today’s day and age, two of the most commonly cited reasons are an explosion of obesity in Americans and poor dietary choices. Whether or not merely paying more attention to health literacy and education can change these things remains to be seen; but perhaps in the near future our society and cultures will be able to look at this period and be thankful that they are healthier than we ever could be. Until then, more studies need to be done on the effectiveness of health literacy on high-risk populations. Time will allow for longitudinal studies to be performed. These studies will be able to show the effect of health literacy and health education on students from elementary to high school. Health is a constantly evolving subject and our practices need to evolve along with it.
Poems About Food Habits
Resources
Nancy D. Berkman , Terry C. Davis & Lauren McCormack (2010) Health Literacy: What Is It?, Journal of Health Communication: International Perspectives, 15:S2, 9–19, DOI: 10.1080/10810730.2010.499985
Nutbeam, D. (2008). The Evolving Concept Of Health Literacy. Social Science & Medicine, 2072–2078. Retrieved October 19, 2014, from www.edsevier.com/locate/socscimed
Health Literacy Interventions and Outcomes: An Updated Systematic Review: Executive Summary. March 2011. Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, Rockville, MD. http://www.ahrq.gov/research/findings/evidence-based-reports/litupsum.html
Bersgma, L. (2004, August 25). Empowerment Education. Retrieved October 19, 2014.
Dewalt, D., & Hink, A. (2009). Health Literacy and Child Health Outcomes: A Systematic Review of the Literature. Pediatrics, S265-S274.
Bernhardt, A., Wilking, C., Adachi-Mejia, A., Bergamini, E., Marijnissen, J., & Sargent, J. (2013, August 28). Fast-Food Marketing Aimed at Children. Retrieved October 19, 2014.
MedTechMedia. (2012, December 27). Health Literacy in the US. Retrieved October 19, 2014, from http://healthworkscollective.com/73026/health-literacy-us
Leger, L. (2001). Schools, health literacy and public health: Possibilities and challenges. Health Promotion International,197–205.
New Mexico’s Youth Health Literacy Project Uses Memes to Promote School-Based Health Centers. (2012, January 1). Retrieved October 19, 2014, from http://www.elev8kids.org/node/657
Sharif, I., & Blank, A. (2009, August 27). Relationship between Child Health Literacy and Body Mass Index in Overweight Children. Retrieved October 19, 2014.
Benham Deal, T., & Hodges, B. (2009, January 1). Role of 21st Century Schools in Promoting Health literacy. Retrieved October 25, 2014.
Kutner, M., & Greenburg, E. (2006, September 6). The Health Literacy of America’s Adults. Retrieved October 19, 2014, from http://nces.ed.gov/naal/health_results.asp
Education Matters: No health without health literacy — Victoria Advocate. (2014, October 25). Retrieved October 30, 2014, from https://www.victoriaadvocate.com/news/2014/oct/25/education-matters-no-health-without-health-literac/
