UCLA receives $20 million grant for obesity prevention project

The UCLA Fielding School of Public Health and the Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center received a new $20 million federal grant this week, which will fund a national project to combat obesity.

The grant came from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention as part of the organization’s Racial and Ethnic Approaches to Community Health initiative, according to a press release.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention gifted the money to UCLA to aid in a project promoting healthy lifestyles in public locations, such as schools and offices. The project, called “Healthy-by-Default,” instructs community groups, such as Boys & Girls Clubs of America, how to provide healthy options in place of unhealthy ones, said Roshan Bastani, one of the two principal investigators for the project.

“We engage people where they spend a lot of (their) time, so we make the healthy option the default option,” Bastani said.

Through the program currently, she said, researchers encourage local companies to have 10-minute exercise breaks once or twice per day to ensure that employees are active.

The grant came as a pleasant surprise to the entire team, Bastani said.

The new funding will allow the Healthy-by-Default program to expand its scope nationally and concentrate on metropolitan hubs where ethnic minorities make up a majority of the population, Bastani said.

Bastani and Antronette Yancey are both professors of health policy and management at the Fielding School and have spent 20 years researching various topics in health disparities, such as obesity prevention.

“We try to make a real difference in the communities we help,” Bastani said.

Compiled by Stephen Stewart, Bruin reporter.

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