The authors propose a restructuring of the "food as health" paradigm to "food as well-being

Exposure to poor-quality food environments has important effects on adolescent eating patterns and overweight. Policy interventions limiting the proximity of fast-food restaurants to schools could help reduce adolescent obesity.

Marketing and policy researchers aiming to increase the societal impact of their scholarship should engage directly with relevant stakeholders. For maximum societal effect, this engagement needs to occur both within the research process and throughout the complex process of knowledge transfer. The authors propose that a relational engagement approach to research impact complements and builds on traditional approaches. Traditional approaches to impact employ bibliometric measures and focus on the creation and use of journal articles by scholarly audiences, an important but incomplete part of the academic process. The authors recommend expanding the strategies and measures of impact to include process assessments for specific stakeholders across the entire course of impact, from the creation, awareness, and use of knowledge to societal impact. This relational engagement approach involves the cocreation of research with audiences beyond academia. The authors hope to begin a dialogue on the strategies researchers can use to increase the potential societal benefits of their research.

Prior research has demonstrated that the proximity of fast-food restaurants to schools is related to higher youth body weight and also suggests that this relationship may be stronger in urban areas. Research also suggests that some segments of youth may be more vulnerable to this relationship than others. The authors investigate the relationship of fast-food proximity to middle and high schools and adolescent weight outcomes, with a focus on understanding intra-urban differences across groups defined by ethnicity and school income. Their results suggest that body weight associations with proximity to a fast-food restaurant from school are not equal for all youth. Black and Hispanic students at low-income and urban schools have higher associations between school–fast food distance and youth body weight, up to four times greater than general distance associations. The authors discuss their findings in light of the complexity of understanding the relationship between retail marketing proximity and weight-related associations among youth, as well as obesity disparities.

In this essay, the authors explore the emergence, growth, and future of the transformative consumer research movement. The notion of a social movement is used to conceptualize the organizing activities of research performed with the goal of enhancing consumer well-being. The authors trace the informal/formal and individual/collective actions that support their claim that transformative consumer research is an academic movement. They reflect on the future hurdles the movement faces to remain healthy and dynamic as well as the significant synergies that exist with public policy researchers.