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APHA Scientific Session and Event Listing

Recorded presentation

Jess Alderman, MD, JD¹, Jason A. Smith, MTS, JD¹, Ellen J. Fried, JD, MA², and Richard A. Daynard, JD, PhD¹. (1) Public Health Advocacy Institute (Tobacco Control Resource Center), Northeastern University School of Law, 102 The Fenway, 117 Cushing Hall, Boston, MA 02115, 617-373-2026, jasonsmith@phaionline.org, (2) Department of Nutrition, Food Studies, and Public Health, New York University, 35 W. 4th Street, 10th Floor, New York, NY 10012-1172

Childhood obesity is a serious problem that demands immediate action from public health experts. Adequate public health remedies will inevitably be varied and complex, and the law has a unique role to play in addressing this epidemic. Past legal approaches have tended to focus on the problem at an individual level. Laws that mandate nutrition education and lawsuits based on the health of a person or a class of people may be valuable to the involved individuals, but from a public health perspective their scope can be limited. To effect comprehensive change, legal solutions to childhood obesity should ameliorate “macro-environmental” risk factors addressing population-wide in addition to individual issues.

For example, to encourage increased physical activity, the law can be more effective by targeting the environment (zoning, crime, and the availability of public space) rather than exhorting individual behavior change. The law is more effective by ensuring that good health is possible for everyone rather than protecting the health of one individual. The need for this ecological modeling is particularly evident considering food marketing to children; only population-wide considerations can adequately address this issue. Challenges to implementing such macro-environmental methods include political resistance, concerns about federalism and the First Amendment, and the food industry's “deep capture” of the debate itself. Nonetheless, legal solutions that consider the needs of an entire population rather than of individuals are extremely promising and may be the most effective way the law can protect the health of the nation's children.

Learning Objectives:

• Describe the major legal approaches to obesity
• Articulate the ideal theoretical framework for legal strategies to combat obesity
• List potential complications with a population-wide application of law to obesity
• Analyze how a macro-environmental approach could address effectively the issue of marketing junk food to children

Keywords: Obesity,

Presenting author's disclosure statement:

Any relevant financial relationships? No

Recorded presentation