- Author: Saoimanu Sope
About 15 years ago, Mary Maser saw an ad in the classified section of her local newspaper for a job opening with the Expanded Food and Nutrition Education Program serving San Diego County. As a community education specialist with EFNEP, she has provided nutrition lessons for thousands of Spanish-speaking residents until her retirement on July 1.
Maser, who is of Mexican descent and fluent in Spanish, enjoyed working with the Spanish-speaking community in San Diego because it kept her connected to her roots. Before joining University of California Cooperative Extension, Maser taught factory workers English and served as an interpreter in the medical field.
“I've had a lot of different jobs and being fluent in Spanish has helped me in my line of work tremendously,” she said.
“We offer the EFNEP courses in English and Spanish, but a majority of my students were Spanish speakers,” recalled Maser, who taught nutrition education and healthy living practices to adults. Making her students feel as comfortable as possible was important to Maser.
Based on her time with EFNEP, Maser said that she is most proud of her students' dedication.
“I was impressed with the number of students who showed up to every class, wanting to learn, even during the pandemic,” Maser said. When the COVID-19 shelter-in-place mandate hit California, Maser said she started teaching students over the phone.
“I had one student who was spending quality time with family in Tahoe, and I told her that it was okay for us to postpone class,” Maser said. “But she insisted and said she wanted to do it, so we did.”
Maser was the only community education specialist who worked in San Diego's North County. For years, she participated in community events like the Fallbrook Clinic Health Fair, promoting EFNEP and connecting with residents. In 2019, she was recognized by Senator Brian Jones for her work with EFNEP and continued efforts teaching healthy living.
“Many of my students didn't speak English well or at all and had varying levels of education. For some, it was the first class they ever took in their life,” said Maser. “There's a lot of fear and stress they deal with on a daily basis, but it never stopped them from coming to class,” she added, emphasizing how much she admires her students' tenacity to learn.
Shirley Salado, UCCE nutrition supervisor for EFNEP in San Diego County, described Maser as a positive, respectful and considerate teammate. “Mary loved to teach nutrition and fondly cared for the Hispanic community. She was so attentive to her participants, ensuring nutrition knowledge was clearly presented to help families make better healthy choices for their well-being,” Salado said.
In her retirement, Maser is looking forward to traveling and learning another language. “I think Italian would be the easiest for me to learn, and I know a little bit of Portuguese, but I'm also interested in French,” she said.
Maser will also be using retirement to practice what she has preached for so many years, by focusing on her health and wellness.
- Author: Mike Hsu
Young people across California and the U.S. enjoy healthier, more nutritious food options at school, thanks to the contributions of Gail Woodward-Lopez, who retired on July 1 as the associate director of research at the Nutrition Policy Institute, a part of University of California Agriculture and Natural Resources.
Woodward-Lopez officially joined UC ANR in 2015, when she and other researchers at the Atkins Center for Weight and Health at UC Berkeley merged with NPI. But her association with UC ANR goes back much further, as her work at CWH was always directed by UC Cooperative Extension academics – including the research that paved the way for California's “junk food ban” in schools.
Two groundbreaking bills, signed in 2005, set nutrition standards in California for “competitive foods”– the items sold in vending machines and from food service a la carte (as opposed to federally subsidized school meals). That legislation – which inspired similar policy changes across the country – was informed by the work of Woodward-Lopez and her colleagues, who had looked at the financial impact of establishing those standards.
“Our study was so pivotal that I literally had people calling me from the floor of the Senate or the Assembly when they were debating that legislation,” recalled Woodward-Lopez.
Changing perceptions of population weight gain
Originally intending to pursue a career in neurobiology, Woodward-Lopez found that lab work didn't suit her temperament. Seeking to work more directly on social issues, she embarked on a public health path, with an emphasis on nutritional aspects that incorporated her interest in biological sciences.
Woodward-Lopez's early work focused on a challenge that was just beginning to catch the attention of researchers: the rapid rise in the Body Mass Index (BMI) among the U.S. population. In tracing the causes of this epidemic, she and her colleagues shifted academic and public attention toward the host of environmental factors that contribute to weight gain – instead of focusing exclusively on an individual's choice to eat healthy and be physically active.
Woodward-Lopez, who helped set the identity and agenda of the Center for Weight and Health when it was founded in 2000, moved policy and practice beyond educational approaches and public awareness campaigns. As she noted: “No one thinks sugar-sweetened beverages are good for you.”
“Education alone is not going to work if people do not have access to the healthy foods and opportunities for physical activity, if they're not safe in their neighborhoods, or if they can't afford the healthy options,” she explained.
Given her seminal role in the field, Kaiser Permanente sought out Woodward-Lopez as a “thought partner” on the organization's community-based obesity prevention programs and school health work.
“Gail brought deep rigor and expertise, of course, but also a super-practical, community-focused perspective to our work,” said Loel Solomon, professor of health systems science at the Kaiser Permanente Bernard J. Tyson School of Medicine. “Her integrity and values around health equity were evident in everything we did together, and our communities are so much the better for it.”
Elevating and enhancing CalFresh Healthy Living
At the Nutrition Policy Institute, the focus of Woodward-Lopez's work has been refining the evaluation and delivery of SNAP-Ed, the educational component of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (commonly referred to as “food stamps”). Known in California as CalFresh Healthy Living, SNAP-Ed represents the largest single source of ongoing funding for nutrition and physical activity promotion in the state.
“The program can really impact millions of people,” Woodward-Lopez said. “For county health departments, this is one of their main sources of funding and provides the backbone for everything else they do in nutrition and physical activity.”
But given the unevenness and variety of interventions implemented by local health departments, determining the efficacy of those efforts is a daunting task. Woodward-Lopez and her NPI colleagues have been instrumental in devising creative approaches that help pinpoint the most effective public health measures.
For example, researchers found that combining school policy changes with increased opportunities for physical activity was the best strategy to encourage student fitness. They discovered that health departments diverting resources away from nutrition programs during the COVID-19 pandemic disproportionately affected communities of color. And they also continue to emphasize that interventions need to be tailored to the specific cultural and political conditions within a community.
“I think in all of the work we do, we try to come up with those practical applications – what does this mean for communities? How can we do this differently? How are our findings actionable?” Woodward-Lopez said.
Her contributions toward the evaluation of California Department of Public Health SNAP-Ed have impressed and inspired Lauren MacKenzie Whetstone, chief of CDPH's Research, Evaluation and Strategic Alignment Section, Nutrition Education and Obesity Prevention Branch.
“Gail and her team have elevated the quality of our evaluation work and the evaluation support that we provide to local health department grantees,” said MacKenzie Whetstone, who has known Woodward-Lopez for nearly a decade. “Gail contributed substantially to statewide SNAP-Ed evaluation as well, again working collaboratively to ensure high quality evaluation. Our work is all the stronger due to Gail's dedication to excellent SNAP-Ed evaluation.”
To the benefit of the field and community health, Woodward-Lopez plans to remain engaged in her life's work. While she looks forward to spending more time with loved ones, traveling and pursuing her interests in art and music, she will remain a guiding voice for advancing public health.
“I'd really like to get more involved in policy through advocacy and through doing things like writing letters to the editor or social media commentary,” she said. “I already have some ideas for some editorials I want to write.”
UC ANR always has a lot going on in the world of nutrition, but this month we seem as active as ever in this important space.
First came the announcement late in February that Pat Crawford, a UC ANR Cooperative Extension specialist who previously served as the director of the Atkins Center for Weight and Health at UC Berkeley, would be joining our Nutrition Policy Institute (NPI). Pat and her growing team of researchers will join NPI, which conducts research to inform, build, and strengthen nutrition-related policy, outreach and programs.
NPI then took center stage later in March when it distributed a national news release urging the U.S. Department of Agriculture to make water “first for thirst.” What this means, essentially, is that NPI is taking a strong stand in asking the federal government to promote plain drinking water as the healthiest beverage. We've even asked the USDA to add a symbol for water to its “MyPlate” graphic.
NPI developed a “Take Action!” page on its website with easy-to-follow guidelines for submitting comments on the Dietary Guidelines for Americans. For those of you who might be interested in sharing with your friends and family, the “Take Action!” web page is located at http://npi.ucanr.edu/water.
Finally, on March 24, the Sacramento Bee published this op-ed piece penned by UC ANR Cooperative Extension advisor Rachel Surls from Los Angeles County. Working with our communications staff, Rachel writes eloquently about urban agriculture and cites several examples of how urban farming is working well in cities across our state. She clearly shows how those case studies support UC's Global Food Initiative and its goals.
As always, I appreciate the work all of you do on behalf of UC ANR and, by extension, for the people of California. Thank you!
Barbara
- Author: Pamela Kan-Rice
UC Davis will host the National Agricultural Biotechnology Council’s conference “Promoting Health by Linking Agriculture, Food and Nutrition,” on June 16-18.
With health care consuming so much of the developed world’s resources, there is a critical need to understand how diet, nutrition, and the underlying agricultural production systems impact human health. The NABC’s 22nd conference will address the science linking agriculture, food, and nutrition to health with the goal of informing both research priorities and government policies that seek to improve human livelihoods.
To learn more about the program or to register, go to http://nabc.ucdavis.edu.
NABC was formed by the Boyce Thompson Institute in collaboration with Cornell University, Iowa State University and UC Davis in 1988.