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Politics & Government

Vitality Contest Judges Visit Hermosa

Health experts tour the South Bay to make their selection in a nationwide competition.

Children at Madison Elementary School gave a team from wellness organizations Healthways and Blue Zones an appropriate welcome Thursday: an eight-minute aerobics session. After all, the experts were in town to judge whether the beach cities should collectively be selected a "vitality city" in a nationwide competition sponsored by the two groups.

Mayors Michael DiVirgilio of Hermosa Beach, Mitch Ward of Manhattan Beach and Mike Gin of Redondo Beach all participated in the workout session by performing deep lunges and spirited jumping jacks.

"How long is eight minutes?" one woman said to the man standing behind her.

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"They didn't warn you, come in aerobics clothes," the man replied.

The youth-led exercise kicked off the team's Vitality City site visit, which also included a bike ride on the Strand and PowerPoint presentations by the mayors. 

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"Part of what we'll do here is a scoping stage, where we find out what's working really well here," said Joel Spoonheim, the director of health initiatives for Blue Zones.

If the beach cities are selected, Blue Zones and Healthways will design policies that the Beach Cities Health District can use to encourage people to adopt healthful behaviors. The project would continue for the next 18 months to two years.

According to Justin Smith, Blue Zones' vice president of corporate development, the group would design policies based on the data they collected from last week's tours, as well as through the Gallup and Healthways' well-being index, which measures the community based on key factors: life evaluation, emotional health, physical health, healthful behavior, the work environment and basic access to food, shelter and health care.

The Beach Cities Health District currently has a well-being index rating of 67.6, Smith said, which is above the national average. However, the beach cities' work environment and access to health care ranked low in comparison to the national average for other cities.

"The aggregate [rating] gives you a lens into, say, how we could put more in there [to improve community health]," Smith explained. "But now we need to look deeper and really understand what the issues are."

Dan Buettner, a writer for National Geographic who interviewed people in four vitality locations where life expectancy was the longest, founded Blue Zones and spearheaded the competition as a way to look deeper into a community's health.

The four zones are Sardinia in Italy, Okinawa in Japan, Loma Linda in California and the Nicoya Peninsula in Costa Rica, Buettner said. He called these areas blue zones, and the beach cities hope to soon join that list.

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