One factor that may be important in explaining rising childhood obesity is food prices. This report explores the effect of food prices on children's Body Mass Index (BMI) using data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, Kindergarten Class of 1998-99 (ECLS-K) and the Quarterly Food-at-Home Price Database. On average, higher prices for soda, 100 percent juices, starchy vegetables, and sweet snacks are associated with lower BMIs among children. In addition, lower prices for dark green vegetables and lowfat milk are associated with reduced BMI. The effect of subsidizing healthy food may be just as large as raising prices of less healthy foods. Charts and tables. This is a print on demand edition of an important, hard-to-find report.
One factor that may be important in explaining rising childhood obesity is food prices. This report explores the effect of food prices on children's Body Mass Index (BMI) using data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, Kindergarten Class of 1998-99 (ECLS-K) and the Quarterly Food-at-Home Price Database. On average, higher prices for soda, 100 percent juices, starchy vegetables, and sweet snacks are associated with lower BMIs among children. In addition, lower prices for dark green vegetables and lowfat milk are associated with reduced BMI. The effect of subsidizing healthy food may be just as large as raising prices of less healthy foods. Charts and tables. This is a print on demand edition of an important, hard-to-find report.
Children's health has made tremendous strides over the past century. In general, life expectancy has increased by more than thirty years since 1900 and much of this improvement is due to the reduction of infant and early childhood mortality. Given this trajectory toward a healthier childhood, we begin the 21st-century with a shocking developmentâ€"an epidemic of obesity in children and youth. The increased number of obese children throughout the U.S. during the past 25 years has led policymakers to rank it as one of the most critical public health threats of the 21st-century. Preventing Childhood Obesity provides a broad-based examination of the nature, extent, and consequences of obesity in U.S. children and youth, including the social, environmental, medical, and dietary factors responsible for its increased prevalence. The book also offers a prevention-oriented action plan that identifies the most promising array of short-term and longer-term interventions, as well as recommendations for the roles and responsibilities of numerous stakeholders in various sectors of society to reduce its future occurrence. Preventing Childhood Obesity explores the underlying causes of this serious health problem and the actions needed to initiate, support, and sustain the societal and lifestyle changes that can reverse the trend among our children and youth.
Creating an environment in which children in the United States grow up healthy should be a high priority for the nation. Yet the prevailing pattern of food and beverage marketing to children in America represents, at best, a missed opportunity, and at worst, a direct threat to the health prospects of the next generation. Children's dietary and related health patterns are shaped by the interplay of many factorsâ€"their biologic affinities, their culture and values, their economic status, their physical and social environments, and their commercial media environmentsâ€"all of which, apart from their genetic predispositions, have undergone significant transformations during the past three decades. Among these environments, none have more rapidly assumed central socializing roles among children and youth than the media. With the growth in the variety and the penetration of the media have come a parallel growth with their use for marketing, including the marketing of food and beverage products. What impact has food and beverage marketing had on the dietary patterns and health status of American children? The answer to this question has the potential to shape a generation and is the focus of Food Marketing to Children and Youth. This book will be of interest to parents, federal and state government agencies, educators and schools, health care professionals, industry companies, industry trade groups, media, and those involved in community and consumer advocacy.
Childhood obesity has reached epidemic proportions in the United States and continues to increase in prevalence in almost all countries in which it has been studied, including developed and developing countries around the globe. The causes of obesity are complex and multi-factorial. Childhood obesity becomes a life-long problem in most cases and is associated with long term chronic disease risk for a variety of diseases including type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease, non-alcoholic fatty liver disease, as well as psychosocial as issues and obesity seems to affect almost every organ system in the body. In recent years there has been tremendous progress in the understanding of this problem and in strategies for prevention and treatment in the pediatric years. Childhood Obesity: Causes, Consequences, and Intervention Approaches presents current reviews on the complex problem of obesity from the multi-level causes throughout early life before adulthood and the implications for this for long-term disease risk. It reviews numerous types of strategies that have been used to address this issue from conventional clinical management to global policy strategies attempting to modify the global landscape of food, nutrition, and physical activity. Each chapter is written by a global authority in his or her respective field with a focus on reviewing the current status and recent developments. The book features information on contributing factors to obesity, including developmental origins, social/family, birth cohort studies, influence of ethnicity, and global perspectives. It takes a life-course approach to the subject matter and includes exhaustive treatment of contributing factors to childhood obesity, such as assessment, environmental factors, nutrition and dietary factors, host factors, interventions and treatment, consequences, and further action for future prevention. This broad range of topics relevant to the rapidly changing field of childhood obesity is suitable for students, health care professionals, physicians, and researchers.
Since 1980, childhood obesity rates have more than tripled in the United States. Recent data show that almost one-third of children over 2 years of age are already overweight or obese. While the prevalence of childhood obesity appears to have plateaued in recent years, the magnitude of the problem remains unsustainably high and represents an enormous public health concern. All options for addressing the childhood obesity epidemic must therefore be explored. In the United States, legal approaches have successfully reduced other threats to public health, such as the lack of passive restraints in automobiles and the use of tobacco. The question then arises of whether laws, regulations, and litigation can likewise be used to change practices and policies that contribute to obesity. On October 21, 2010, the Institute of Medicine (IOM) held a workshop to bring together stakeholders to discuss the current and future legal strategies aimed at combating childhood obesity. Legal Strategies in Childhood Obesity Prevention summarizes the proceedings of that workshop. The report examines the challenges involved in implementing public health initiatives by using legal strategies to elicit change. It also discusses circumstances in which legal strategies are needed and effective. This workshop was created only to explore the boundaries of potential legal approaches to address childhood obesity, and therefore, does not contain recommendations for the use of such approaches.
The prevalence of childhood obesity has risen dramatically in the last several decades in the United States, and is currently considered to be epidemic. This book examines the many factors that play a role in this crisis including the effect of food and beverage prices on children's weights; how food away from home affects children's diet quality; the environments to which children are exposed in their daily lives (ie: schools, child care, communities) can influence the healthfulness of their diets; and the potential effects on taxing caloric sweetened beverages.
On June 21â€"22, 2017, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine's Food and Nutrition Board convened a workshop in Washington, DC, to explore the range of policies and programs that exist at the federal, state, tribal, and local levels to limit sugar-sweetened beverage consumption in children birth to 5 years of age. Topics examined over the course of the 1.5-day workshop included prevalence and trends in beverage intake among young children; beverage intake guidelines applicable to the age range of interest; challenges and opportunities of influencing beverage consumption; the role of industry in beverage intake; and knowledge gaps and research needs. This publication summarizes the presentations and discussions from the workshop.
Virtually all fiscal measures influence people's health, through their impacts on behaviour, consumption, income and wealth. A narrow subset of fiscal measures, however, can be more directly aimed at improving health by targeting behaviours and risks that are known to be strongly associated with health outcomes. The purpose of this book is to discuss the subject of these measures, which we define as 'health taxes'. The book aims to enumerate key health taxes of interest, explore their positive and negative effects, and how these effects are influenced by the design of these taxes and the context in which they are applied. We ask how and where they can be implemented. Critically, we build an argument throughout the book for why policymakers across government should care about health taxes.
Over the years, approaches to obesity prevention and treatment have gone from focusing on genetic and other biological factors to exploring a diversity of diets and individual behavior modification interventions anchored primarily in the power of the mind, to the recent shift focusing on societal interventions to design "temptation-proof" physical, social, and economic environments. In spite of repeated calls to action, including those of the World Health Organization (WHO), the pandemic continues to progress. WHO recently projected that if the current lifestyle trend in young and adult populations around the world persist, by 2012 in countries like the USA, health care costs may amount to as much as 17.7% of the GDP. Most importantly, in large part due to the problems of obesity, those children may be the first generation ever to have a shorter life expectancy than that of their parents. Obesity Prevention presents the most current research and proposals for addressing the pandemic. Past studies have focused primarly on either genetic or behavioral causes for obesity, however today's research indicates that a strongly integrated program is the best prospect for success in overcoming obesity. Furthermore, focus on the role of society in establishing an affordable, accessible and sustainable program for implementing these lifestyle changes is vital, particularly for those in economically challenged situations, who are ultimately at the highest risk for obesity. Using studies from both neuroscience and behavioral science to present a comprehensive overview of the challenges and possible solutions, The brain-to-society approach to obesity prevention focuses on what is needed in order to sustain a healthy, pleasurable and affordable lifestyle. - Explores the "brain-to-society" approach to obesity prevention, focusing on an integrative approach to addressing the obesity pandemic - Presents both the nueroscientific and the behavioral factors that impact eating habits - Identifies the challenges and suggests solutions for altering attitudes toward food on both an individual and a societal level
