Reversing the childhood obesity epidemic: A policy and environmental change strategy

During the past four decades, obesity rates have soared among all age groups, increasing more than four times among children ages 6 to 11. Today, nearly a third of children and adolescents are overweight or obese. That's more than 23 million kids and teenagers. In response to this rapid rise in childhood obesity, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) initiated a national agenda for change that seeks to reverse the childhood obesity epidemic by 2015 by improving access to affordable healthy foods and increasing opportunities for physical activity in schools and communities across the nation. In pursuit of that goal, RWJF has developed three integrated strategies that seek to: obtain evidence of what works, take action to promote the most promising approaches and use advocacy to build a broad national constituency for childhood obesity prevention.

During this presentation, Paloma will discuss the strategy development to advance policy and environmental changes to reverse the rise in childhood obesity. She will provide an overview of programming and discuss the evolution of programs to become more focused on policy and environmental changes.

Learning objectives:

1) To understand the state of childhood obesity in the nation

2) To learn how the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation developed its strategy to reverse childhood obesity epidemic

3) To understand how the integrated strategies of building the evidence, action and advocacy aim to reverse the childhood obesity epidemic