Harlem Word: Dr. Williams talks about Harlem Hospital's Hip Hop H.E.A.L.S program

Dr. Olajide Williams, MD, MS is a neurologist [1] at Harlem Hospital. He is also the founder of the Hip-Hop Public Health Education Center [2], which uses hip-hop to teach people about health. Here Dr. Williams describes his Hip Hop H.E.A.L.S (Healthy Eating and Living in Schools) program that educates children about health at their schools. Q: What is the goal of the Hip Hop H.E.A.L.S (Healthy Eating and Living in Schools) program?A: The Hip Hop H.E.A.L.S (Healthy Eating and Living in Schools) program works to prevent disease in school-aged children. Two major causes for many diseases are unhealthy eating and lack of exercise. I developed the Hip Hop H.E.A.L.S (Health Eating and Living in Schools) program to help fix the problem of poor nutrition and lack of exercise among children. I hope that by empowering kids about these issues through professionally produced hip-hop music, hip-hop video games, cartoons, choreographed dance moves, and comic books that all focus on nutrition and exercise, I will be able to help lower rates of obesity [3] in Harlem and help prevent all of the other diseases that are associated with unhealthy lifestyle choices such as diabetes [4] and high blood pressure [5] (hypertension). Q: How old are the kids that you are working with?A: We're focusing on children in third through sixth grade, but we have included children up to eighth grade. These kids are between the ages of 8 and 12 years old.Q: How can kids join the Hip Hop H.E.A.L.S (Healthy Eating and Living in Schools) program?A: Kids cannot join the Hip Hop H.E.A.L.S. (Health Eating and Living in Schools) program alone, but their schools can. Public schools, many of which are required to incorporate health activities into their curriculums, can use our program to fulfill this purpose. Our program works within the public school calendar, during regular school hours, and is used throughout the tri-state area. Many principals love our program and because of this, we've enrolled over 12,000 children in the last school-year alone, in schools all across four out-of five NYC boroughs.Read more from Dr. Williams by clicking the links below:

• Using hip hop to teach kids about stroke [6]
• Stroke Diaries [7]
• Children can teach adults about stroke [8]

Harlem Word is a series of interviews with Harlem health experts, written by HHPC and reviewed by our Health Advisory Board