Interesting and fun
- The 20 Worst Drinks in America
- The Great Banana Challenge: How to Dispense Healthy Snacks From A Vending Machine: Design a Fruit Elevator
- Is Candy Evil, or Just Misunderstood?
- The number of items on the front of food packaging affects people’s judgments about how much food is inside and how much they ate.
- Newark’s healthy food grocery initiative
Resources
Resources from the Food Policy Council
- The Community Food Security Coalition provides how-to guides, a sample budget, and a list of current food policy councils.
- Food Policy Councils: Lessons Learned is a report on a variety of food policy councils, their structures, successes, and challenges.
- What’s Cooking in Your Food System: A Guide to Community Food Assessment offers guidance and explanation for information gathered from community food assessments, and how they can be applied to the work of Food Policy Councils.
Community Prevention and the Public poll results reveal that there is very strong support for community prevention efforts among the public. 73% of the American public supports allocating resources towards community prevention initiatives, described as efforts to make it easier for people to maintain their health and make healthier choices.
The public also supports specific initiatives: Making school lunches healthier and more nutritious (92%), labeling packaged foods so that it’s clearer which ones contain unhealthy amounts of fat, sodium, or sugar (90%), banning smoking from public places like restaurants and bars (82%), and increasing access to fresh fruits and vegetables through grocery stores and farmers’ markets in neighborhoods (87%).
Reports & Articles
Eleven Original Articles Illustrate Impact of Social Factors on Health and Health Care Journal of Health and Social Behavior, October 2010
This supplemental issue explores the contributions that social and behavioral scientists have made in reframing public understanding of health and health care issues, including reshaping the health reform debate. Among other highlights, several of the journal articles emphasize the persistent inequalities in health and health care in the United States by social status (i.e., education, income, and occupation) as well as race and ethnicity, and demonstrate how these disparities influence the ways in which Americans use the health care system. These articles underscore the urgency of addressing health where it starts—in our homes, schools, jobs and communities.
Experts Share Promising Best Practices for Collaboration, Preventing Chronic Disease, November 2010
This issue features a set of 11 essays and articles that examine the role that partnerships play in influencing the health of a community. In this issue, population health experts, business leaders and others explore promising model public-private partnerships and highlight key features that make such collaborations effective.
Lunch Line Redesign New York Times, October 21, 2010
Experiments that researchers have done in cafeterias at high schools, middle schools and summer camp programs, as well as in laboratories, have revealed many ways to use behavioral psychology to coax children to eat better. Here are a dozen such strategies that work without requiring drastic or expensive changes in school menus.
Some Not Happy About Schools’ Happy Meal Fundraisers Contra Costa Times, October 14, 2010
Elementary school teachers poured drinks, filled ice cream cones and handed out Happy Meals at a McDonald’s restaurant on Wednesday to raise money for their school. McDonald’s calls it “McTeacher’s Night,” a fundraiser that funnels 20 percent of the night’s profits to teachers who stand behind the fast-food counter serving meals to smiling students
Buying Junk Food with Plastic, Wall Street Journal, October 26, 2010
When we pay in plastic, credit or debit, we’re more likely to buy unhealthy food. In recent years, the use of credit and debit cards has ballooned. So have American waistlines. The average American carries 4.4 cards in her wallet and a third of U.S. adults are obese these days, up from 23% in 1988. But does the mode of payment make a difference when it comes to buying unhealthy food? According to these researchers, the answer is yes.
Food, grocery trade associations preempt FDA labeling plans, Food Politics, October 27, 2010
Yesterday, the Grocery Manufacturing Association and Food Marketing Institute announced a new labeling initiative for their member companies: a new front-of-package nutrition labeling system. There is only one explanation for this move: heading off the FDA’s Front-of-Package (FOP) labeling initiatives.
The Latest Sodium Wars, The Atlantic, October 25, 2010
Scientific debates about the role of sodium in high blood pressure go on and on. Committees of scientists reviewing the research invariably conclude that people would be healthier if they ate less salt. But wait! Hypertension rates have been increasing for years without any change in sodium excretion.
FoodNavigator.com has a special issue on obesity research. Highlighted research includes:
- Sucralose does not promote weight gain: Consumption of sucralose and sucralose-sweetened products does not affect gut hormones linked to hunger, or detrimentally affect blood sugar levels.
- Food addiction: Fat may rewire brain like hard drugs: Overeating may be driven by a same neurobiological mechanism in the brain as drug addiction.
- Overeating drives fat gain at the hips: Fat tissues in the upper and lower body may gain weight differently.
