Catalysts for change: Legal pathways to healthy, active local environments

Background:

Very few Americans live a healthy lifestyle, as judged by the proportion who are non-smokers, maintain a healthy weight, eat enough fresh fruit and vegetables and exercise regularly. Law is an important policy tool for the prevention of obesity and other risk factors for chronic disease, particularly when it aims to create supportive environments to encourage healthier lifestyles.

Objective

This paper draws on a model for thinking about the legal components of an active, healthy local environment, understood in terms of the physical spaces and places where people live, work, and eat, and through which they travel. Through the frames of work, recreation, transport and access to food, the model seeks to identify how law can create local environments to encourage active living, improved public health nutrition, obesity prevention, and smoking cessation.

This paper will focus particularly on how laws and regulatory processes serve as pathways to changed patterns of physical activity across the population. Progress in this area does not depend on perfect models but on identifying the most powerful and effective legal catalysts or “stimulants” for behavioural change. These will vary between jurisdictions: this paper will provide examples.

Results and significance

Law can contribute to chronic diseases prevention by “building in” opportunities for active living into the fabric of local environments. Identifying these pathways provides a focus for advocacy and law reform, monitoring and research. There are important synergies between chronic diseases prevention and strategies for reducing environmental impacts and carbon emissions.