"Junk food" is a term used to describe food that is high in calories from macronutrients such as sugar and fat, and often also high in sodium, making it hyperpalatable, but with insufficient dietary fiber, protein, or micronutrients such as vitamins and minerals. It is also known as "high in fat, salt and sugar food". The term junk food is a pejorative dating back to the 1950s. Many variations of junk food can be easily found in most supermarkets and fast-food restaurants. Due to easy accessibility, commercially-oriented packaging, and often-low prices, people are likely to consume it.
Preventive healthcare, or prophylaxis, is the application of healthcare measures to prevent diseases. Disease and disability are affected by environmental factors, genetic predisposition, disease agents, and lifestyle choices, and are dynamic processes that begin before individuals realize they are affected. Disease prevention relies on anticipatory actions that can be categorized as primal, primary, secondary, and tertiary prevention.
Food policy is the area of public policy concerning how food is produced, processed, distributed, purchased, or provided. Food policies are designed to influence the operation of the food and agriculture system balanced with ensuring human health needs. This often includes decision-making around production and processing techniques, marketing, availability, utilization, and consumption of food, in the interest of meeting or furthering social objectives. Food policy can be promulgated on any level, from local to global, and by a government agency, business, or organization. Food policymakers engage in activities such as regulation of food-related industries, establishing eligibility standards for food assistance programs for the poor, ensuring safety of the food supply, food labeling, and even the qualifications of a product to be considered organic.
Kelly David Brownell is a clinical psychologist and scholar of public health and public policy at Duke University whose work focuses on obesity and food policy. He is a former dean of Duke's Sanford School of Public Policy. Noted for his research dealing primarily with obesity prevention, as well as the intersection of behavior, environment, and health with public policy, Brownell advised former First Lady Michelle Obama's initiatives to address childhood obesity and has testified before Congress. He is credited with coining the term "yo-yo dieting", and was named as one of "The World's 100 Most Influential People" by Time Magazine in 2006.
The Rudd Center for Food Policy and Health, formerly named the Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity, is a non-profit research and public policy organization that promotes solutions to food insecurity, poor diet quality, and weight bias. Located in Hartford, Connecticut at The University of Connecticut, the Rudd Center was co-founded in March 2005 at Yale University by benefactor Leslie Rudd and Kelly D. Brownell. The Rudd Center moved from Yale to the University of Connecticut in December 2014.
A fat tax is a tax or surcharge that is placed upon fattening food, beverages or on overweight individuals. It is considered an example of Pigovian taxation. A fat tax aims to discourage unhealthy diets and offset the economic costs of obesity.
Food Fight: The Inside Story of the Food Industry, America's Obesity Crisis, & What We Can Do About It, published on September 16, 2004, by McGraw-Hill, was written by Kelly D. Brownell, Director of the Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity at Yale.
Food marketing is the marketing of food products. It brings together the food producer and the consumer through a chain of marketing activities.
Obesity is common in the United States and is a major health issue associated with numerous diseases, specifically an increased risk of certain types of cancer, coronary artery disease, type 2 diabetes, stroke, and cardiovascular disease, as well as significant increases in early mortality and economic costs.
Advertising to children refers to the act of advertising products or services to children as defined by national laws and advertising standards.
Food studies is the critical examination of food and its contexts within science, art, history, society, and other fields. It is distinctive from other food-related areas of study such as nutrition, agriculture, gastronomy, and culinary arts in that it tends to look beyond the consumption, production, and aesthetic appreciation of food and tries to illuminate food as it relates to a vast number of academic fields. It is thus a field that involves and attracts philosophers, historians, scientists, literary scholars, sociologists, art historians, anthropologists, and others.
While genetic influences are important to understanding obesity, they cannot explain the current dramatic increase seen within specific countries or globally. It is accepted that calorie consumption in excess of calorie expenditure leads to obesity; however, what has caused shifts in these two factors on a global scale is much debated.
Based in Washington, D.C., Leadership for Healthy Communities is a $10-million national program of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation designed to engage and support local and state government leaders nationwide in their efforts to advance public policies that support healthier communities and prevent childhood obesity. The program places an emphasis on policies with the greatest potential for increasing sustainable opportunities for physical activity and healthy eating among children at highest risk for obesity, including African-American, Latino, American Indian and Alaska Native, Asian-American and Pacific Islander children living in lower-income communities. The foundation's primary goal is the reversal of the childhood obesity epidemic by 2015.
Let's Move! was a public health campaign in the United States led by former First Lady Michelle Obama. The campaign aimed to reduce childhood obesity and encourage a healthy lifestyle in children.
Criticism of fast food includes claims of negative health effects, animal cruelty, cases of worker exploitation, children-targeted marketing and claims of cultural degradation via shifts in people's eating patterns away from traditional foods. Fast food chains have come under fire from consumer groups, such as the Center for Science in the Public Interest, a longtime fast food critic over issues such as caloric content, trans fats and portion sizes. Social scientists have highlighted how the prominence of fast food narratives in popular urban legends suggests that modern consumers have an ambivalent relationship with fast food, particularly in relation to children.
The National Policy and Legal Analysis Network to Prevent Childhood Obesity, or NPLAN for short, is a nonprofit organization funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and which, according to its website, plays an important role in the Foundation's effort to reverse the obesity epidemic by 2015, a commitment that was announced in 2007. Their partners include, in addition to the RWJF, Active Living by Design and the Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity at Yale. They are run by ChangeLab Solutions, originally known as Public Health Law and Policy, which focuses not only on obesity but also on tobacco regulation. The NPLAN advocates for a soda tax, specifically an excise tax, and have published model legislation which earmarks the funds raised to go to programs to prevent and treat obesity. According to the American Public Health Association, they provide "legal technical assistance focused on childhood obesity prevention policy." The Network has also "developed model menu labeling ordinances, requiring chain restaurants to post calorie and other nutrition information on menus." NPLAN has advocated for the use of licensing and zoning laws to "shape the way land is used and how businesses operate," and has praised regulations requiring nutrition standards on foods sold in snack machines in schools. According to their website, they "work on four broad issue areas: healthy community food systems, healthy schools, healthy land use planning, and food marketing." The American Bar Association's director of public health and policy Marice Ashe wrote the following soon after the NPLAN's founding was announced: "NPLAN will serve as an incubator where lawyers, policymakers, advocates, and scientists collaborate to produce legal and policy tools and resources. As research and products are developed, NPLAN will also operate as a national one-stop source for access to practical, efficient, and effective legal technical assistance products."
Obesity and the environment aims to look at the different environmental factors that researchers worldwide have determined cause and perpetuate obesity. Obesity is a condition in which a person's weight is higher than what is considered healthy for their height, and is the leading cause of preventable death worldwide. Obesity can result from several factors such as poor nutritional choices, overeating, genetics, culture, and metabolism. Many diseases and health complications are associated with obesity. Worldwide, the rates of obesity have nearly tripled since 1975, leading health professionals to label the condition as a modern epidemic in most parts of the world. Current worldwide population estimates of obese adults are near 13%; overweight adults total approximately 39%.
Mary Story is Professor of Global Health and Community and Family Medicine, and director of Education and Training, Duke Global Health Institute at Duke University. Dr. Story is a leading scholar on child and adolescent nutrition and child obesity prevention.
Marlene B. Schwartz is the current director of the Rudd Center for Food Policy and Health at the University of Connecticut.
A food swamp is an urban environment with few grocery stores but several non-nutritious food options such as corner stores or fast-food restaurants. One definition gives a general ratio of four unhealthy options for each healthy option. The term was first coined by researchers conducting longitudinal studies of the link between increased access to grocery stores and rising obesity rates. Rose and colleagues in this study found that even with a new access to local grocery stores, the proportion of convenience stores and fast food to a single grocery store did not shift food choices nor obesity rates. This indicates that food swamps are separate from food deserts.
