Philadelphia Youth make a difference

PUFFA is truly grassroots with a strong collaboration made up of residents, block captains, youth, community-based organizations, schools, libraries, recreation centers and gardeners. All come together in PUFFA to make the places where they live and work healthier and safer.

The W.K. Kellogg Foundation selected Philadelphia Urban Food and Fitness Alliance (PUFFA) to as a grantee in its Food & Community Program effort. The $1.2 million grant, over three years, is one of nine awarded by the W.K. Kellogg Foundation to community and non-profit groups that are working together to transform how food moves from the farm to the table in Philadelphia and how our communities can have access to safe places for fitness and play. The Health Promotion Council (HPC) administers and staffs PUFFA.

PUFFA’s work focuses on:

* Improving healthy food available for our children at school
* Increasing access to safe and pleasant places for play and physical activity
* Increasing healthy food in our communities




What is PUFFA?



PUFFA (Philadelphia Urban Food & Fitness Alliance) is part of a national movement funded by the W.K. Kellogg Foundation to shape how we feed our children and create safe places where they can be physically active. PUFFA has partners who are community residents and youth; experts in how food moves from the farm to our schools, our grocery stores and our tables; those who transform vacant land into places for safe play and gardening and those who provide opportunities and places for fitness such as dance, yoga and martial arts.



What does PUFFA mean to Philadelphia?



During the Planning Phase, community residents and youth surveyed four Philadelphia communities looking at how easy it was to buy affordable and healthy food or to find safe places for play and fitness. Now PUFFA partners are working with The Enterprise Center CDC in West Philadelphia and the Southeast Philadelphia Collaborative to improve access to healthy food in our schools and our communities and to create safe places for play and fitness.

3 Vegetables That Fight Abdominal Fat

A unique way that a few specific vegetables can actually stimulate the burning of abdominal fat...

Chemicals that force your body to hold onto belly fat

Something you may have never heard about is that certain chemicals in our food supply and our environment, such as pesticides, herbicides, and certain petrochemicals from air and water pollution, household cleaners, cosmetics, etc can react with your body and make your body store excess abdominal fat.

These chemicals are known as xenoestrogens.

Xenoestrogens are chemicals that you are exposed to (and are hard to avoid in the modern world) that have an estrogenic effect in your body. Excess exposure to these can cause hormone balance disruptions for both men and women. So these can wreak havoc in the body for both guys and gals.

These estrogenic chemicals that we are exposed to on a daily basis can stimulate your body to store belly fat, along with many other problems (including cancer risks in the long term).

So here's where this specific class of vegetables comes in handy...

One of those cool tricks that I teach my clients that hire me for nutritional counseling is the use of cruciferous vegetables to help fight against stomach fat.

Cruciferous vegetables such as broccoli, cauliflower, brussels sprouts, kale, cabbage, etc. contain very specific and unique phytonutrients such as indole-3-carbinol (I3C) that help to fight against these estrogenic compounds...

And by fighting against these belly fat stimulating estrogenic chemicals, this is just 1 more step in helping you to win the battle against abdominal fat!

So there you go... just another excuse to do what mom always told you and eat more broccoli!

I've really learned to like brussells sprouts in the last year too... Melt a little grass-fed cheese on them and some garlic and they're great!