10,550 research outputs found

    Shaping a Healthier Generation: Successful State Strategies to Prevent Childhood Obesity

    Get PDF
    Provides an overview of the socioeconomic and environmental risk factors and costs of childhood obesity. Presents examples of state policies to prevent the epidemic by promoting healthy behaviors in child care, school, community, and healthcare settings

    Shaping a Healthier Generation: Healthy Kids, Healthy America State Profiles of Progress

    Get PDF
    Profiles states' efforts to advance childhood obesity prevention at the state level through childcare settings, policy prioritization, and school-based activities. Presents case studies of strategies, partnerships, and tools for coordinating policies

    Promoting Healthy Communities and Reducing Childhood Obesity: Legislative Options

    Get PDF
    Summarizes legislation proposed or enacted in 2007-08 in the areas of healthy eating and physical activity such as nutrition, physical education, and obesity prevention and treatment, as well as healthy community design and access to healthy food

    Big Food and Soda Versus Public Health: Industry Litigation Against Local Government Regulations to Promote Healthy Diets

    Get PDF
    Diets high in fats, sugars, and sodium are contributing to alarming levels of obesity, cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes, and certain cancers throughout the United States. Sugary drinks, which include beverages that contain added caloric sweeteners such as flavored milks, fruit drinks, sports drinks, and sodas, are the largest source of added sugar in the American diet and an important causative factor for obesity and other diet-related diseases. City and county governments have emerged as key innovators to promote healthier diets, adopting menu labeling laws to facilitate informed choices and soda taxes, warnings labels, and a soda portion cap to discourage consumption. These measures raise tension between the public health promotion and the food and beverage industry’s interests in maximizing profits. This article analyzes the food and beverage industry’s efforts to undermine local government nutrition promotion measures, including lobbying, funding scientific research, public messaging, and litigation. It examines four case studies (New York City’s soda portion cap, San Francisco’s soda warnings ordinance, and soda taxes in Philadelphia and Cook County), and distills steps that local governments can take to address industry opposition and help ensure the legal viability and political sustainability of key public health interventions

    F as in Fat: How Obesity Policies Are Failing in America, 2009

    Get PDF
    Examines annual trends in national and state obesity rates, related health indicators, and policies. Discusses the economic downturn's effect on Americans' health and healthcare costs. Calls for investment in community-based disease prevention programs

    Regulating the fast-food landscape: Canadian news media representation of the Healthy Menu Choices Act

    Get PDF
    With the rapid rise of fast food consumption in Canada, Ontario was the first province to legislate menu labelling requirements via the enactment of the Healthy Menu Choice Act (HMCA). As the news media plays a significant role in policy debates and the agenda for policymakers and the public, the purpose of this mixed-methods study was to clarify the manner in which the news media portrayed the strengths and critiques of the Act, and its impact on members of the community, including consumers and stakeholders. Drawing on data from Canadian regional and national news outlets, the major findings highlight that, although the media reported that the HMCA was a positive step forward, this was tempered by critiques concerning the ineffectiveness of using caloric labelling as the sole measure of health, and its predicted low impact on changing consumption patterns on its own. Furthermore, the news media were found to focus accountability for healthier eating choices largely on the individual, with very little consideration of the role of the food industry or the social and structural determinants that affect food choice. A strong conflation of health, weight and calories was apparent, with little acknowledgement of the implications of menu choice for chronic illness. The analysis demonstrates that the complex factors associated with food choice were largely unrecognized by the media, including the limited extent to which social, cultural, political and corporate determinants of unhealthy choices were taken into account as the legislation was developed. Greater recognition of these factors by the media concerning the HMCA may evoke more meaningful and long-term change for health and food choicesYork University Librarie

    Restoring Health to Health Reform: Integrating Medicine and Public Health to Advance the Population\u27s Wellbeing

    Get PDF
    The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act is a major achievement in improving access to health care services. However, evidence indicates that the nation could achieve greater improvements in health outcomes, at a lower cost, by shifting its focus to public health. By focusing nearly exclusively on health care, policy makers have chronically starved public health of adequate and stable funding and political support. The lack of support for public health is exacerbated by the fact that health care and public health are generally conceptualized, organized, and funded as two separate systems. In order to maximize gains in health status and to spend scarce health resources most effectively, health care and public health should be treated as two interactive parts of a single, unified health system. The core purpose of health reform ought to be the improvement of the population’s health. We propose five criteria that would significantly advance this goal: prevention and wellness, human resources, a strong and sustainable health infrastructure, robust performance measurement, and reduction of health disparities. Although the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act includes provisions addressing these criteria, population health is not a central focus of the reform. In order to guide health reform implementation and to inform future health reform efforts, we offer three major policy reforms: changing the environment to incentivize healthy behavioral choices, strengthening the public health infrastructure at the state and local levels, and developing a health-in-all policies strategy that would engage multiple agencies in improving health incomes. Adopting these reforms would facilitate integration and dramatically improve the population’s health, particularly when compared to the health gains likely to be realized from a continued focus on access to health care services
    • …
    corecore