Improving Laws and Legal Authorities for Obesity Prevention and Control

This is the second paper in a two part series on the laws and legal authorities for obesity prevention and control. In this paper, the authors present the applicable laws and legal authorities that public health professionals and lawyers can consider implementing to close the legal gaps identified in the first paper (“Assessing Laws and Legal Authorities for Obesity Prevention and Control”). This set of legal action items encompass the federal, tribal, state, local, and community levels and should be considered when developing, implementing, and evaluating obesity prevention and control strategies and interventions. The paper organizes the action items within three key domains: healthy lifestyles, healthy places, and healthy societies. In the healthy lifestyles domain, the goal is to make the default environment one that fosters healthy lifestyles by making the healthy option the easier choice through actions such as altering farm subsidies to increase the affordability of healthy foods and the regulation of marketing practices targeting children. The healthy places domain recognizes that the surrounding community, workplace, and transportation options influence the ability to make healthy choices. Actions under this domain include the strategic use of zoning, the support of public transportation, and employer incentivization for healthy lifestyles at the workplace. The final domain of healthy societies addresses the complex societal causes and contributors to obesity, disparities, and discrimination. This domain includes actions such as the strengthening of public policies for school nutrition standards and increased physical activity, increasing access to health care (including preventative services), and addressing weight discrimination to ensure social justice and adequate care

Taxing Food and Beverage Products: A Public Health Perspective and a New Strategy for Prevention

The power to tax and spend is considered a primary government power, and the use thereof is associated with great public health achievements. The greatest public health challenge at present stems from the increase in obesity and chronic diseases due to poor nutrition. Several taxation strategies have emerged in the health and economic literature to raise revenue, deter consumption, and address food prices and obesity directly. These proposals include taxing obese individuals, taxing problematic food products, and instituting a tax based on certain food components. This article weighs each proposal\u27s value and disadvantages and concludes by proposing a new tax and spend strategy: a manufacturers\u27 excise tax on all highly processed food and beverage products. This tax would be instituted to raise revenue and provide conditional funding to states and locales to directly alter their food environment. It avoids the pitfalls inherent in the other tax strategies and is a viable method to address public health and the food environment more broadly

No Need to Break New Ground: A Response to the Supreme Court’s Threat to Overhaul the Commercial Speech Doctrine

Commercial speech and core speech are fundamentally different, and the basis for their current First Amendment protections reflects this understanding. The purpose for protecting each type of speech is unique, and the ability of the government to compel or restrict such speech differs. Two distinct analytical frameworks and two different tiers of protection have emerged. The U.S. Supreme Court has afforded protection against unwarranted restriction of commercial speech by applying intermediate scrutiny under the test that it established in Central Hudson Gas & Electric Corp. v. Public Service Commission. On the other hand, the Court has subjected regulations of core speech to strict scrutiny. However, in 2011, the Court conflated the two analyses and relied on core-speech precedent when it analyzed a commercial-speech issue in Sorrell v. IMS Health Inc. This Article argues that the Court must uphold the distinction between commercial speech and core speech and that it must reject all future opportunities to overhaul the commercial-speech doctrine. The Court should continue using the Central Hudson test to apply intermediate scrutiny to challenged regulations of commercial speech. Further, this Article encourages the Court to better define the intermediate scrutiny standard that Central Hudson set forth by clarifying the second, third, and fourth prongs of the Central Hudson test. Such clarification will encourage more consistency in lower courts’ opinions in the realm of commercial speech

Taxing Food and Beverage Products: A Public Health Perspective and a New Strategy for Prevention

The power to tax and spend is considered a primary government power, and the use thereof is associated with great public health achievements. The greatest public health challenge at present stems from the increase in obesity and chronic diseases due to poor nutrition. Several taxation strategies have emerged in the health and economic literature to raise revenue, deter consumption, and address food prices and obesity directly. These proposals include taxing obese individuals, taxing problematic food products, and instituting a tax based on certain food components. This article weighs each proposal\u27s value and disadvantages and concludes by proposing a new tax and spend strategy: a manufacturers\u27 excise tax on all highly processed food and beverage products. This tax would be instituted to raise revenue and provide conditional funding to states and locales to directly alter their food environment. It avoids the pitfalls inherent in the other tax strategies and is a viable method to address public health and the food environment more broadly

Assessing Laws and Legal Authorities for Obesity Prevention and Control

This is the first paper in a two part series on the laws and legal authorities for obesity prevention and control, which resulted from the National Summit on Legal Preparedness for Obesity Prevention and Control in 2008. In this paper, the authors apply the “laws and legal authorities” component of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) legal framework on public health legal preparedness to demonstrate the essential role that law can play in the fight against obesity. Their analysis identified numerous laws and policies in the three vital domains of healthy lifestyles, healthy places, and healthy societies. For example, in terms of healthy lifestyles, governments can impact nutrition through: food subsidies, taxation, and bans; food marketing strategies; and nutritional labeling and education. With regard to healthy places, state and local governments can apply zoning laws and policy decisions to change the environment to encourage healthy eating and physical activity. Governments can promote healthy societies through laws and legal authorities that affect the ability to address obesity from a social perspective (such as antidiscrimination law, health care insurance and benefit design, school and day care for children, and surveillance). This paper describes instances of how current laws and legal authorities affect the public health goal of preventing obesity in both positive and negative ways. It also highlights the progressive use of laws at every level of government (i.e., federal, state, and local) and the interaction of these laws as they relate to obesity prevention and control. In addition, general gaps in the use of law for obesity prevention and control are identified for attention and action. (These gaps serve as the basis for the companion paper, which delineates options for policymakers, practitioners, and other key stakeholders in the improvement of laws and legal authorities for obesity prevention and control.

Large-scale automated analysis of news media: A novel computational method for obesity policy research: Novel Media Analysis of Obesity Framing

Analyzing news media allows obesity policy researchers to understand popular conceptions about obesity, which is important for targeting health education and policies. A persistent dilemma is that investigators have to read and manually classify thousands of individual news articles to identify how obesity and obesity-related policy proposals may be described to the public in the media. We demonstrate a novel method called “automated content analysis” that permits researchers to train computers to “read” and classify massive volumes of documents