In Richmond County, 75 percent of adults are overweight or obese.

Of children aged 4 and under, 68. 4 percent are overweight or obese, and of children 5 to 17, 82.3 percent are overweight or obese.

Those are startling numbers gathered by an independent consultant firm hired by FirstHealth in 2007.

The survey done by FirstHealth revealed that 63 percent of those adults also lived sedentary lifestyles.

The state’s numbers are also high, but Richmond County surpasses those numbers in leaps and bounds. The state has an obesity rate of 63 percent for adults, and 33.5 percent for children aged 10 to 17.

North Carolina is 14th in the nation for childhood obesity and 12th for adult obesity.

“Obesity is a complicated issue,” said Roxanne Leopper, policy director for FirstHealth Community Health Services. “Access to food, education and physical activity all play a part in the obesity crisis.”

But here in Richmond County there are a number of grocery stores and avenues for physical activity, though they may not be accessible to all county residents.

The town of Rockingham, for example, is very walkable, Leopper said. She said she is working with the town to get it a Fit Community designation because they do have the infrastructure in place to promote physical activity, like a good network of sidewalks.

But the problem seems to be a lack of education on the problems of obesity, not a lack of opportunity to improve one’s health.

During the FirstHealth Children’s Health Fair this year, physicians were on hand to speak with parents of children with above normal Body Mass Index (BMI) numbers. A persons’ BMI is calculated by their height and weight.

Leopper said a lot of parents were surprised their children had an unhealthy BMI because of a belief that “chubby is healthy.”

“But it’s not,” Leopper said. “It’s one thing to fight obesity as an adult, but a child who is obese has an 80 percent chance of remaining an obese adult. Their likelihood of being obese is greater and they’re at greater risk for chronic diseases like diabetes. This is evidenced by second-, third-, and fourth-graders with type-II diabetes.”

And to promote a healthy lifestyle among children, FirstHealth has implemented education programs for kindergarten through third-graders in Richmond County. Through their Fit Together program they promote healthy nutrition and physical exercise.

“But with those numbers, we still have a lot of work to do,” Leopper said referring to the statistics.

Leopper said a lot of what’s contributed to obesity has been argued, but there have been studies regarding the lack of access to grocery stores in lower-income neighborhoods, which leads people to shop at convenience stores which sell mostly junk food. There also were neighborhood schools once upon a time that children could walk to, and now children are bussed to school miles away from their homes.

“So there is a role for city planners to create better infrastructure like bike lanes, and partnering with some of these initiatives with getting the word out there and getting kids active,” Leopper said.

In Moore County, Leopper said FirstHealth created a Walkable School Bus program at an elementary school where once a week parents drop their students off at a trail leading to the school, and volunteer adults walk the children to school. It’s about a mile’s walk and about 150 students participate each week.

For adults, FirstHealth has three different programs in place.

The first is Active Living Every Day, which is a 12-week classed taught in churches, community groups and the hospital, that teaches people, not how to exercise, but how to live an active lifestyle, and incorporate fitness into their every day life.

The second is Healthy Eating Every Day, another 12-week class that focuses on nutrition, calorie education, keeping records, watching portion sizes, etc.

The third is a new program called Happy Kitchen, which is a six-week program where each week the class learns a new, healthy recipe, and at the end of the class participants take home a bag of groceries so they can cook for their families.

“A lot of people think healthy doesn’t taste good, but it can,” Leopper said. “It’s definitely an educational process.”

And while exercise, nutrition and education are all important, people might not realize what a huge role obesity plays on medical costs. Not only will your individual health care cost more, because it’s hard on your body to carry so much extra weight, but obesity in this county costs $72 million annually in both direct medical expenses and indirect costs such as lost productivity and absenteeism, according to www.beactivenc.org. If this trend is not reversed, that cost could reach $101 million by 2010.

Be Active N.C.’s economic study said “these wasted expenditures would be sufficient to fund about 140 new jobs in the county, based on average salary figures.”

But, if just three percent of adults in the county become more active and get down to a healthy weight, that could reduce the cost by $3 million annually.

Leopper said education is crucial in fighting the obesity epidemic and that until people realize the full scope of the problem, little will be done to change it.

“It’s not like second hand smoke, you’re not hurting anyone directly by being obese,” Leopper said. “But it does have an economic impact and I don’t think people know what a large problem it is.”

And because a lot of people gain weight during the holidays, Leopper said a good resource was www.eatsmartmovemorenc.com, which provides users with weekly recipes and tips to maintaining their weight during the holidays.

“It has a plethora of information,” Leopper said. “It’s also a great resource for parents.”

For more information on the classes FirstHealth has to offer, call FirstHealth Richmond Memorial Hospital at 417-3000.