Monthly Archives: February 2011

From the Director of Health Studies For nearly thirty years I have been a fan of the Boston Celtics basketball team.  They are the American National Basketball Association’s most successful team.  In the history of the NBA, no other team has won more Championships.  According to basketball writer, Bethlehem Shoals (2010), the Celtics teams that won sixteen titles between 1957 and 1986 did so with an “almost dismissive attitude toward individual glory”.  These teams had great individual players, any one of whom on any given night was capable of (and often delivered) an outstanding individual performance.  In the main though, the strength of these teams came from a wonderful intermingling of player and team identity.  It seems that the Celtics then lost sight of this, as their most recent (and seventeenth) title came in 2008, twenty-two years after their last. This 2008 Championship was on my mind over the Christmas break because I was reading Top of…

From the Head of Griffith House and Year 9 Coordinator At School Assembly last week, Dr Bell spoke to the girls about the importance of eating healthy food, engaging in regular exercise and gaining adequate sleep. She encouraged the girls to practise the habit of consuming nutritious food with the consumption of less healthy “treats” occurring only occasionally. The subject of eating a balanced diet to maintain strong physical health is very topical at the moment with various media reports exploring the disturbing possibility that the current generation of teenagers will not live as long as their parents.  In The Weekend Australian, February 12-13 2011, an article by Alexander Gambotto-Burke entitled “Mum’s the word on obese kids” featured the work of Flinders University senior lecturer and dietitian, Anthea Magarey.  Magarey heads the Parenting, Eating and Activities for Child Health programme, known as PEACH, designed to engage parents of younger children in making healthy lifestyle changes to…