HE AL T HY-BY-DE F AUL T

Racial and Ethnic Approaches to Community Health (RE ACH)

University of California, Los Angeles (UCL A)

I nvestigator Team
Antronette (Toni) Yancey, MD, MPH., Roshan Bastani, PhD.,
Beth Glenn, PhD., Annette Maxwell, PhD., William McCarthy, PhD
Fielding School of Public Health and Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center, UCLA

Obesity is a global pandemic and has reached the level of a national crisis in the U.S. Immediate action is
needed on multiple fronts to address this mounting crisis. Obesity control intervention approaches implemented
to date have reached only a fraction of those most at risk. Left unattended, the obesity epidemic will continue to
disproportionately affect the most disenfranchised segments of the population--low income and ethnic minority
children and adults. The Healthy-By-Default REACH Project aims to systematically influence the social and
cultural environments in which people live, learn, work, play, and worship. Rather than expecting busy,
stressed individuals in low-resource neighborhoods to seek out opportunities to be physically active and eat
nutrient-rich foods, we engage captive audiences in settings which they already frequent (e.g., schools,
workplaces, churches, etc), by instituting environmental supports for physical activity and nutrient-rich food
choices, making them the deIault options that can only be avoided with eIIort or by 'opting out.

Strategies: Core intervention strategies consist of integrating short
physical activity breaks during non-discretionary time (e.g., non-
PE time in school, 'paid time during work day, worship services,
or spectator sports events) and establishing policies to ensure that
appealing nutritious options are accessible anytime food is served
at meetings/gatherings, in cafeterias, or vending machines. Wide
dissemination of our approach will be achieved by incorporating
accessible and appealing nutrient-rich foods and short bouts of
enjoyable physical activity into organizational routines within a
variety of settings across a large geographic area. The Healthy-By-
Default REACH Project will establish a national network of
community organizations, and provide them with training,
technical assistance and support for implementation and
dissemination of these strategies at the local level.

Reach: We will concentrate our efforts in
medium- to large-sized urban majority-
minority metropolitan areas throughout the
U.S. The adjacent map shows the 13
regions where we will begin this work.
Over the course of five years, the Healthy-
By-Default project will serve millions of
African Americans, Asian
Americans/Pacific Islanders,
Hispanics/Latinos and American Indians in
these population centers.





Supported by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) 2012-2017

For more information:
Denise Woods, DrPH
Project Director, UCLA REACH
(310) 825-6413/denise.woods@ucla.edu