Get Healthy

Healthy recipes, positive role model spice lesson for Chicago students

Julian Coleman, a sophomore at Gary Comer College Prep in Chicago, eats a meal of low-fat macaroni, baked chicken, and salad Sunday at the U-Cook program in Merrillville. The program focused on the importance of healthy eating.
(Photograph courtesy of Kyle Telechan/The Times.)

A couple of healthy dishes, nine interested students and one positive role model proved the perfect recipe last Sunday.

Chef Glennard Brooks spent the afternoon talking to students from Chicago’s Gary Comer College Prep, a charter high school, about healthy eating habits and how he became executive chef at the Hilton Garden Inn in Merrillville.

“He talked about what I want to go to school to learn how to do,” said Jamani Jones-O’Bryant, 15, a sophomore who said he watches cooking shows and cooks at home.
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Munster students bowl to raise money for MDA

Bradley Patricks (left) keys in information for the score-keeping device and Emma Hong (right) shows her bowling form Wednesday as the Munster High School DECA students bowl to raise money for the Muscular Dystrophy Association at Plaza Lanes in Highland. DECA is a marketing organization for high schoolers. (Photography by John J. Watkins.)

Munster High School students bowled Wednesday to raise money for the Muscular Dystrophy Association, hoping to top last year’s amount of $3,000, said teacher Kent Lewis.

The students belong to DECA, a marketing association for high schoolers, and 50 of them bowled at Plaza Lanes. If they top $3,000, it will be the most amount raised by a high school group in Northwest Indiana, Lewis said.

Nationally, DECA is associated with the MDA but Lewis said the students had a more personal reason to bowl for the organization.
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Freddy Ortega, a Clark High School junior, wears the T-shirt he designed to support breast cancer awareness. (Photograph courtesy of Michelle Kominsky.)

The National Football League’s decision to designate October’s games as American Breast Cancer Awareness games scored big with Freddy Ortega, 16.

Ortega has two aunts who are breast cancer survivors and always wears a pink wristband to show his support for them. He liked how the NFL and its teams promoted breast cancer awareness messages with pre-game and in-stadium initiatives and by having coaches and staff personnel and players wear pink ribbons and pink uniform gear.

So after the game, the George Rogers Clark High School student headed to town. He went into The Junk Yard to see if there was something there in line with the cause. Within a few moments, he decided to customize a shirt. He chose a royal blue T-shirt—Clark’s color—and had the initials of his school, ‘GRS’, printed on the upper right collar. Below the letters he added ‘class of 2011.’ In the center, he had the word ‘Supports’ printed next to a pink ribbon twisted in the shape of a heart.
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Nadia Czekajewski got braces on her teeth when she was 8. Now she’s in third grade, turning 9, and “she’ll be done before she begins fourth grade,” said her father, Tomasz Czekajewski.

“It was a wise decision to start young,” said Czekajewski, whose family lives in the Lakeview section of Chicago. “Kids are not as self-conscious at this age.”

Braces used to be another miserable part of being a teenager, but now some kids, like Nadia, start and finish orthodontic treatment long before adolescence.
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Most people are familiar with weight loss (bariatric) surgery for adults.

These procedures (mainly gastric bypass and gastric banding) are becoming increasingly more common in very obese older adolescents, though they comprise less than 1 percent of these surgeries overall. A bypass procedure creates a small pouch for a new stomach, rendering the larger, original stomach nonfunctional.

With the band procedure, a band is placed laparoscopically and is adjustable so that the size of the functioning stomach can be made larger or smaller.
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Handwashing key to limiting spread of germs

College dormitories and classrooms are the perfect breeding grounds for the H1N1 flu (more commonly known as the swine flu) and college students—working hard, getting little sleep and eating less than healthy foods—make easy targets for the virus.

“College kids are more at risk,” says Dr. Daniel Netluch, Saint Anthony Medical Center’s Chief of Emergency Medicine and Urgent Care. “With other kids in close proximity there is a higher level of exposure.”

According to Netluch, just one sneeze that’s not covered—spraying droplets into the air, onto desks and keyboards—is enough to spread the virus to another person. And though not everyone exposed gets the flu, students who are tired and not eating right can be more vulnerable.
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Author recounts ups and downs of teen son’s rehabilitation

When Joan Ryan received a call from the hospital telling her that her 16-year-old son had been injured in a skateboarding crash, she assumed it would mean a few stitches and a lot of wasted time in the emergency room. But Ryan arrived to find that her son, Ryan Tompkins—who wasn’t wearing a helmet when skateboarding—was in a coma and close to death.

For the next few months as she watched him awaken from the coma and then struggle through a long and painful rehabilitation process, she thought about the past and her son’s long struggles with academics and social situations, his double diagnosis of autism and attention deficit disorder and the guilt that she experienced in blaming herself as a mother. These feelings of inadequacy were coupled with her exasperation and impatience with his outbursts and lack of capabilities.

Tompkins’ accident and recovery helped Ryan, who recounts this process in her book, The Water Giver: The Story of a Mother, a Son and Their Second Chance (Simon & Schuster 2009, $24), to rethink their relationship and to learn to let go of the illusion of control and to instead focus on loving and accepting him.
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Every coach will try to get their team to jump higher, but do they teach them how to land? Every coach will try to get their team to run as fast as possible, but do they show them how to slow down?

s It’s just a sample of the innovative techniques Parisi offers within a 3,000-square-foot training area at Omni 41 in Schererville. “You can’t patent the push-up,” says program director Mike Kopec. “We just don’t tell kids to do a bunch of activities and exercises. We teach them the how and the why.”

The main goal of Parisi is to build the athletic foundation of the athlete. This includes speed, strength, flexibility, balance, coordination, nutrition and self-confidence. “We start with a high quality and we raise the intensity to meet it,” Kopecki says.

The Parisi Speed School has programs for ages 7 through adult. Many local successful high school athletes have been clients of the program since it opened at Omni 41 last year.

UV purification for pool, changes in food choices among district initiatives

Lake Central school administrators will explore new avenues for wellness for the coming school year, including eliminating the practice of using recess as a form of discipline.

“Developmentally, we know play and exercise is good for primary students,” Superintendent Gerald Chabot said.

There are 15 wellness goals that focus on such things as nutrition, exercise and fitness at all grade levels.

The district also is installing at the high school an ultraviolet water purification system that helps to disinfect the water nonchemically.
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by Martha Waggoner, Associated Press

Rick Lagrappe is 19, without a job and living at home in Shawnee, Okla. But he’s far from bummed out about life.

Lagrappe described himself as a “very happy” person in an MTV poll of 1,100 young people released Tuesday, and he wasn’t alone.

The poll showed that 73 percent of 18- to 24-year-olds were generally happy with life, compared with 66 percent in 2007, even though more of them, including Lagrappe, think they’ll have a harder time finding work, buying a house and raising a family than their parents did.
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