From the Idaho Panhandle

Does Legislative Leadership Keep Off the Pounds in the Panhandle?

By Cate Huisman, 2-24-10

	The Idaho State Capitol, where there are plenty of steps for legislators.

It would be difficult not to be aware that an appalling number of Americans are fat, given the coverage this issue has had in the press of late. Recent data from the National Center for Health Statistics indicate that a third of us are overweight, and another third are obese.

But if you never read the paper and just looked around you in the Idaho panhandle, the problem might not seem so extreme. We have our fat folks, but we don’t seem to have the percentages that we read about. Most people here seem to be of a normal size.

This may be because a lot of north Idahoans hunt and eat lean game meat instead of burgers, or because we shiver off calories doing outdoor chores through a long cold winter, or because we have so many options for fat-burning activities like hiking, biking, and skiing, or even swimming in our big freshwater lakes.

But maybe it’s just because we have good leadership: Our state legislators won the Move It Legislative Challenge two years ago, and they’re in contention again.

For this challenge, Regence BlueShield of Idaho, a nonprofit health care company, issues pedometers to our elected representatives in Boise and encourages them to measure and record the number of steps they take during the legislative session. Two-thirds or more of legislators participate in teams of three that include the two representatives and one senator from each legislative district. Our District 1 people, Senator Shawn Keough and Representatives George Eskridge and Eric Anderson, have participated in every competition that’s been held while they’ve been in office: “They’re very faithful; they’ve done a great job,” says Mike Tatko of Regence.

Keough reported in the first week of the four-week challenge that “the District One delegation is working hard to walk everywhere for our meetings and responsibilities and doing other exercise outside of the work day to boost our scores too. We are working and walking to win!” After two weeks, they were seriously behind an upstart group of southerners from District 25, who had 623, 837 steps to their 442,722. By the end of last week, however—the third week, they’d made up a lot, with 1,027,583 steps to District 25’s 1,067,998. One might say they’d really stepped it up.

This isn’t just mindless chatter. In addition to helping themselves (and us?) be healthier, winning legislators will win cash for schools in their district. The winning team will get $5,000, and the runners up will net $3,000. It won’t quite make up for the drop in school funding expected next year, but it might be enough to save a few PE classes.

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