Where you are born determines how long you are going to live, Eric Schlosser, the bestselling author of “Fast Food Nation,” told 700 union members during Saturday’s keynote address at the 2012 Union Delegates Conference in Hollywood.

If you are born in Beverly Hills, you can expect to live to be 86. But if you are born in Compton, your life expectancy drops by 10 years.

That has to change, Schlosser said—and it will change only when the multiple social and economic factors that have created a set of interrelated conditions are addressed. Poor neighborhoods typically have less access to healthy, affordable food. Schlosser noted that these same neighborhoods are selected by the fast food and junk food industries for concentrated advertising. And as fast food consumption has risen, he pointed out, so have diabetes rates.

“Fast food chains are aggressively targeting people of color,” Schlosser said, and followed that up with a sobering statistic: One of three children born in 2000 will develop diabetes, but among Latino and African-American children, the rate is one out of every two children.

Schlosser’s message resonated with the delegates, who had spent part of the day Friday taking the conference’s theme “You Gotta Move” out of meeting rooms and into the streets. The highlight of those actions was a flash mob performance of Beyonce’s “Move Your Body” in front of Grauman’s Chinese Theatre on Hollywood Boulevard. Delegates also educated passersby on how to take small steps to improve health, and a dozen nurses from UNAC/UHCP provided blood pressure screenings at a local senior center.

The overall message of the conference is a simple one: Health care workers are health care leaders. Chronic but preventable conditions are threatening to overwhelm the nation’s health care system, and the more than 90,000 members of the Coalition of Kaiser Permanente Unions are making a commitment to improve the health of KP’s workforce and to be role models in the communities we serve.

“We have to make sure that every American has access to good, healthy, affordable food,” Schlosser said, and offered a range of possible remedies. Reminding delegates of some of the dramatic changes of the last 50 years—the strides made in civil liberties in the United States, the fall of the Soviet Union, the end of apartheid in South Africa—he concluded with, “Don’t tell me we can’t solve these problems. Start thinking on them, start acting on them—and start moving.”

The delegates also heard Saturday from Ray Baxter, senior vice president of Community Benefit at KP, and Helen Bevan, chief of service transformation at the British National Health Service’s Institute for Innovation and Improvement.

Baxter talked about the pioneering work KP is doing to promote community health and why, and also showed a clip from an upcoming HBO series, “The Weight of the Nation,” produced in partnership with Kaiser Permanente, that will premier in May.

Bevan focused her talk on how to inspire people to take action and the need to appeal not just to their intellect but to their emotions and values.

The conference opened Friday morning with John August, the executive director of the union coalition, and Dave Regan, the president of SEIU UHW, addressing the delegates before they broke up into their groups for the community actions. It will close on Sunday after a talk by Amy Edmondson, a Harvard Business school professor who has studied the conditions that lead to a learning environment in the workplace, and a performance of “Loose Change,” part of the Colorado Equity Care Project.

Afternoons have featured a wide variety of workshops designed to develop leadership skills and provide opportunities to share ideas on improving patient care.

UDC 2012 Objectives

The delegates conference seeks to help participants:

• Develop as leaders

• Illustrate their commitment to their own health and that of the community

• Find value in each other and the Union Coalition

UDC 2012 Outcomes

By the end of the conference participants will:

• Gain new skills to share in the workplace

• Solidify bargaining interests and strategy

• Reinvigorate the struggle to preserve quality care and affordability in the face of the health care crisis

• Increase solidarity

In addition, the Union Coalition Learning Academy provided intensive leadership training to a smaller group of participants on March 21 and 22.