Legal Preparedness for Obesity Prevention and Control: The Public Health Framework for Action

Abstract

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has focused its obesity prevention and control efforts on improving population-level health. A recent Institute of Medicine report identified systems that affect population health, to include health care delivery systems, schools, businesses and employers, communities, and governmental public health infrastructure. CDC uses the public health model to engage these systems, and this process coordinates multiple settings, sectors, and jurisdictions to develop an integrated approach to identify, prevent, and control obesity. The public health approach goes beyond medical care to prioritize policy and environmental strategies that can be implemented across jurisdictional levels, in collaboration with traditional and nontraditional partners. The process ultimately produces tools, guidelines, and interventions that can be used to prevent and control obesity. In this manuscript, we provide an overview of the public health perspective on obesity, outline the public health framework for addressing obesity, and discuss the rationale for leveraging law-based efforts as a tool to accomplish the public health mission.

School Wellness Policies

“…Opportunities exist for the school nurse to lead, advocate, and collaborate with stakeholders to intervene for the benefit of all school children. Population-focused interventions have the potential to decrease both the prevalence of obesity and the risk of acquiring related chronic health problems such as cardiovascular disease, hypertension, asthma, and type 2 diabetes mellitus (Dietz & Hunter, 2009). School nurses, as health experts in the school setting, must take every opportunity to assist individual students in choosing a healthy lifestyle and also intervening at a systems level within their districts to create healthy school nutrition and physical activity environments for the benefit of all.…”

Working Mothers, Breastfeeding, and the Law

“…BREASTFEEDING YIELDS important immediate and longterm health benefits for infants and their mothers, including positive impacts on children's cognitive development and their health as adults. [1][2][3] Breastfeeding is associated with higher productivity and lower absenteeism for breastfeeding mothers and has additional benefits for society (Table 1). [4][5][6] The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends exclusive breastfeeding through 6 months postpartum and continued breastfeeding until the infant is aged at least 12 months.…”

Ethical issues in the development and implementation of nutrition-related public health policies and interventions: A scoping review

“…While monitoring and evaluation are essential parts of any public health policy or program [ 48 ], and the generation of evidence is integral to the work of public health and health service providers [ 24 , 39 , 112 ], too many interventions have still not been subjected to careful evaluation to assess their impact [ 106 , 112 , 114 , 151 , 152 ]. In this context, policy-makers and “implementators” can be left in a void, without guidance to determine what constitutes sound evidence to justify an intervention, and what factors must be considered within such an evaluation.…”