New research has found that an individual’s personal beliefs about the causes of weight problems are a reliable indicator of whether he or she will support public policies designed to combat the problem. The study surveyed 1,009 people on their views about the causes of obesity and their level of support for 16 policy responses, taking demographics, health characteristics and political attitudes into account.
Archive for category Policy
This 58 page report summarizes state legislation proposed and passed in two broad policy categories (a) Healthy Eating and Physical Activity and (b) Healthy Community Design and Access to Healthy Food. The first category addresses policy approaches aimed primarily at nutrition and physical education in schools. The second category focuses on the built environment: land use, transportation and agriculture options. Enjoy reading.
Kelly Brownell of the Yale Rudd Center and Tom Friedan of the New York City Health Department wrote this paper about taxes on sodas – a sensible a way to get people to consume less of them in the April 30 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine.
On May 20th The Times ran a great article to followup on Kelly and Toms article. Please notice the graphs which will be useful in any presentation on public health nutrition. Enjoy!
Junk food advertising on school campuses can undermine schools’ work to promote health and wellness among students. A new fact sheet that explains how school districts can develop an advertising policy that promotes health has been developed.
This free web-based seminar series aims to increase skills of researchers and practitioners in policy evaluation effectiveness.
The plenary sessions from the 20th National Conference on Chronic Disease Prevention and Control are now available to be viewed on-demand.
This review by JAMES F. SALLIS and KAREN GLANZ found that numerous cross-sectional studies have consistently demonstrated that some attributes of built and food environments are associated with physical activity, healthful eating, and obesity. Residents of walkable neighborhoods who have good access to recreation facilities are more likely to be physically active and less likely to be overweight or obese. Residents of communities with ready access to healthy foods also tend to have more healthful diets. Disparities in environments and policies that disadvantage low-income communities and racial minorities have been documented as well.
Legal solutions are immediately available to the government to address obesity and should be considered at the federal, state, and local levels. Including legal strategies for limiting children’s food marketing, confronting the potential addictive properties of food, compelling industry speech, increasing government speech, regulating conduct, using tort litigation, applying nuisance law as a litigation strategy, and considering performance-based regulation as an alternative to typical regulatory actions. Finally, preemption is an overriding issue and can play both a facilitative and a hindering role in obesity policy.
En joy this free report from IDG.com in the UK.
The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) in March announced tthat Temple University in Philadelphia will manage a new $19 million program called Public Health Law Research. The new program will fund research that explores legal and regulatory solutions to pressing health challenges such as chronic diseases and more. Research funded through the new program will answer fundamental questions such as: How do laws influence health and health behavior? Which laws have the greatest impact? Can current laws be made more effective through better implementation or revision? It will also support efforts to improve scientific methods for studying the impact of laws on health.