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Guam - If you are looking for a way to burn off all the food that you ate over the holidays tomorrow the Race 4 Hearts 5K will be held. The Getting Guam Healthy Initiative started four years ago when Senator Dennis Rodriguez realized that the fight against non-communicable diseases needed to begin with prevention.


 He recalled, "We looked at what was the challenges facing the community in terms of health care and we are spending a lot of money on the backend when people are very sick and we need to treat them and get them better. I said its kind of lopsided we need to spend more money on the front end and that's prevention."


Rodriguez says that heart disease is the number one illness that faces our island while the amount of money spent on the treatment of other NCDs such as diabetes is astounding. He says that contributing factors to these diseases is how we live, what we eat and being inactive. "So what we are trying to do now part of the Getting Guam Healthy Initiative is having 5Ks that really raise the awareness that doing simple things like a 5K," he added. Trying to emphasize the importance of living a healthy lifestyle such as eating right, and exercising his office has partnered up with St Luke's, the Guam Plaza Hotel and other sponsors to host the Race for Heart 5K.


"We are going out to the villages trying to get people to eat healthy and trying to emphasize how important it is to live a healthy lifestyle by being active," he explained, "So really it's just trying to instill especially with our young folks that you got to prevent it before it happens."


The Race for Hearts 5K Run/Walk will be held on December 27th show time is 5am with go time at 6am. And will take place from the Guam Plaza Hotel from the traffic light of DFS Galleria to GVB and back. "We are hoping that this time around the motivation is that everyone enjoyed all good food and all the desserts yesterday which was Christmas and today so they want to burn it off this coming weekend and we look forward to a lot more people tomorrow," he said.


In addition to getting Guam healthy the funds from the race for hearts will be used to purchase an echocardiogram for the Guam Memorial Hospital's Special Services Division. For more information on how you can participate contact 649-8638.